Day 7: Brice gives up saving money.

The day started with a one on one surfing lesson, moved on to the airport, Arecibo Observity, Ponce, and ended at the wirelessless 82 y/o Parador Guanica 1929. Details and pictures of my new ride promised as soon as I don't have to use my kindle.

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Apparently, surfers don't actually wake up that early, so I spent a half-hour waiting for my instructor and watching the

water run out from under one of the hotel room doors and cascade off the balcony. Luckily, my guide came right after maintence shut off the leak.

Surfing lessons were good, probably better now (that I know how to surf) than they would have been in the beginning, because now they can focus on correcting the details and not everything. The majority of what I learned boils down to: Push up early, don't drag your feet off the sides, and -most importantly- don't look at the board. Do you watch your snow-board? Your skate-board? (Those of you nodding, that's why you can't stay on your skateboard/snowboard) So why would you watch your surfboard? I dunno, but I did, till today.

So now my arms are worn out, my abs/ribs are sore, certain unfamiliar muscles in my legs hurt, and I have a small cut on my foot from where I stepped on sharper piece of coral (they're all sharp). It was a good day.

Now, off to Arecibo! I was really excited about this... but I got sick of walking to the bus station. And the kid who gave me the bus company's phone number asked if I knew "enough spanish to defend myself." And the conversation with them went something like this.

Bus people-"BuenosDias"

Brice-"Hello"

BP-"No hablo ingles"

Brice-"Necessito-"

So I whipped out my kindle, looked up a Ricon Cab company, and called them.

Cab people-"Hola, Charlie's taxicab"

Brice-"Hola, necessito un cab al areopuerto de la Farmacia Del Pueblo en Rincon"

Cab people-"From the pharmacy to where?"

Brice-"The airport"

Cab People-"OK 15 minutes"

So I went to BQN and rented a car! It is too hot in Rincon to walk, and I packed a "rent a house" level of stuff, not a "move daily" level. And because I went to an airport, I can return it to any other airport, say San Juan... The one thing that wasn't perfect is he said "a esmall car" and I said "Sure." I didn't realize he meant a subcompact. So... I got a 3door Yaris. I got out to the lot and I was a little sad, then I tried to use the lock-unlock dongle to find i didn't have one (how cheap are these people). Then I got in and went to roll down the windows. Look left, look right, can't find switches. Look left again, look right again, see crank. Roll down window. That also explained the lack of lock-dongle: Lack of power switches. Luckily, I didn't have to adjust the mirrors because I still dont know how to do that.

It also has a terrible engine that features angry noised but no acceleration if you step on the pedal past 20mph. The only way they could make it cheaper is to have a manual transmission, but... no luck. My exact thoughts were "hateful little car."

So then I plugged my gps in, clicked on "Arecibo Observatory" and set off! On highways the only upside to the yaris is it doesn't whistle like my tib - but my tib didn't whistle until it was my tib. In cities I started to think that maybe getting a narrow compact was a good choice. It turns out the observatory is in the middle of nowhere, so you then get on these back roads and I decided the yaris was almost a great car. Since it weighs nothing you can slam it through corners, and since it's small and boxy you know exactly where all of your wheels are, which is important when trucks are coming on one-and-a-half-lane roads. As long as you never have to accelerate, you could fall in love with it. If you swapped out engines (and got wider rubber, and did some suspension work), it'd be a fun car. Maybe never a nice car, but fun.

I saw parts of the observatory over the mountaintops, it looks sooo cool, almost there, get to the main gate: it's open Sunday and Wednesday. Those of you in the real world know: Today is neither of those. I just stared at the sign for a few seconds doing math in my head till the guard said "It's closed today" and gave me a brochure. I was tempted to ninja my way in, and then I saw the 4+ security cameras, remembered that it does military work at time, and common sense kicked in. SEE EVERYONE? I LISTEN. Sometimes. A few backroads around it in a circle (which are awesome, this-is-why-I bought-insurance((which I never do))-awesome. One lane wide, 30* grade, grass and bushes encroaching...) to get a few glances while heading on to Ponce!

The hotel Melia was built in 1915 and had a cool all-inclusive thing where for a $30 savings on your two day stay they fed you 6 meals. So I drove the heart (a heart?) of Ponce, pulled up in front, and the hotel Melia also has... plywood over the windows. Ooops. Luckily, Ponce has wifi! So I pulled out my laptop and looked up the other, slightly younger hotel I'd seen online. My GPS has no idea where it is (it gets confused a lot. Earlier it kept telling me to "Turn left onto [pause] Road." It was reading the full name. As far as it could tell, it was named "Road.") Anyways, a bit of google magic and a set of lat-lon coords later I'm off, out of Ponce and up the road to Guanica, where they have a cute hotel built in 1929 with surprisingly good rates. I showered, shaved (finally), and had a delicious Shrimp Alfredo while overlooking the lake/bay/something.