At Least We Have a Shower...The First Few Days

As the night of our first day living in Rincon came upon us, the lights spread out and across the valleys of Aguada and down to the beaches of Agaudilla. I didn't know there would be so many lights in the distance, they made our view even more amazing than I had remembered. We bought a nice king size tempurpedic mattress from Costco, however didn't think to buy a fan. We setteled into bed and looked out at the lights. It was hot and there were mosquitos, but we easily fell into sleep, the exhaustion of the trip our best pillow.

Sometime in the night, however, I woke up to Cyndi crying. She told me she was worried that we had made a mistake and it was all her doing. The dogs were nervous and uncomfortable and we were in a strange place and didn't know anybody and the amount of work to do to make the house comfortable was overwhelming. It was raining and the coqui's, small frogs that make a noise at night that sounds like a cross between a bird and a cricket, were doing their thing, the dogs couldn't get settled and the heat and mosquitos were starting to be annoying. She put the weight of our success at building a life here on her shoulders all in one night and I knew that wasn't fair. She had the right idea, it was up to us to understand the challenges and face them one by one. The dogs would calm down, we had 2 months and a decent budget to get the house where we wanted it to be. The rain and coquis and strangeness of his place is why we had come and we needed to look forward to the adventure we had chosen to take upon ourselves. We made a promise to better communicate and support each other and the the thought of staying here started to become less worrisome and we both fell back to sleep, but I don't think the dogs did.

The next few days our bodies adjusted to the heat and humidity and we bought and installed some ceiling fans. We had a lot of work to do and a limited budget so we needed to prioritize, but the fans would give the best bang for the buck. We drove to the town of Mayaguez, about 30 minutes south and bought our appliances at Sears in the Mayaguez mall. Mayaguez is the largest town near Rincon with a population of about 100,000 and a university that is the Caribbean's leading scince and engineering institution. It's also known as "the city of pure waters" which locals say contributes to the quality of its most famous export, Medalla beer.

2 day later, the Sears delivery truck was lost and we had to meet them at the Lazy Parrot. As I wrote before, the addresses in Rincon are almost meaningless and directions usually involve local landmarks more than streets and numbers. I had a case of Medalla I wanted to get chilling so I quickly drove our rental car through the rain a mile to the Parrot and led the truck back to Sector Cuchillo Pina (our street). We got our refrigerator and the beer was getting cold, we had also bought a BBQ from Home Depot so it looked like I might get to cook soon.

The local market in Rincon is a chain called Econo and the parking lot is always full. They have local meat and produce as well as stuff from the states, but they also carry a lot of the overly processed food we stopped buying in the last few years. Partially hydrogeneated oils, mono and diglycerides and high fructose corn syrup are in almost everything on the store shelves back home and here wasn't much different, so we bought mostly just basics. Our first dinner cooked in Rincon was garlic and olive oil marinated chicken, cooked on the BBQ with fresh bread from the EC Bakery, washed down with a cold Medalla. We gave thanks for all that we had achieved in our first few days on the island and looked forward to the challenges ahead.