We flew from Dal­las to San Juan, which clocked in at around 5 hours. The kids were great on the plane and Pey­ton slept part of the way there, which made it eas­ier on us, and because of that we also got to relax just a lit­tle bit before we hit the ground running.

Our plane left at 1 pm and with the time change to EST we landed at 7 pm. Got our bags (one brand new roller bag now with a bro­ken wheel – thanks AA union thugs for the del­i­cate treat­ment of our lug­gage!) and waited for Enter­prise to “pick us up”.

We had to wait about 20 min­utes, and with the humid­ity in San Juan it felt as if we waited for about 3 years (I started plan­ning Noah’s 9^th and 10^th birth­day par­ties dur­ing the interim). Enter­prise finally showed up, got us to our car and then we pulled out Mag­gie to get us to the Caribe Hilton.

Mag­gie is the nick­name we gave our GPS when we were in Italy last year. Of the many lan­guages that Mag­gie could speak we just thought that she sounded bet­ter speak­ing British Eng­lish (very Helen Mir­ren) rather than Mid­west­ern Amer­i­can. After we returned from Italy I set it to the Amer­i­can accent but it never sounded as cool. So Mag­gie has remained British ever since, and, as usual, she got us where we needed to get.

The Caribe Hilton was lovely and the staff was help­ful, but by the time we arrived at the hotel it was pretty late and the kids were starv­ing, so we left the Hilton and Mag­gie guided us to the place we always seem to end up when we go on a trip – McDonald’s.

A note on order­ing at McDonald’s – we hadn’t real­ized how lit­tle Eng­lish would be spo­ken in Puerto Rico. We had fig­ured that since they are an Amer­i­can pro­tec­torate and our mil­i­tary has a pres­ence there that Eng­lish would be a lit­tle more preva­lent than we found it. As we soon learned most peo­ple at restau­rants or ser­vice indus­tries didn’t speak Eng­lish, but hotel peo­ple did. Great if you’re stay­ing at a hotel your entire stay, not great if you want a Happy Meal.

So Kim worked her way through order­ing at McDonald’s and the kids ate and every­one was happy and slept good that night. The next day was our sched­uled day to leave San Juan and get to Vieques, but first we had to go through the town of Fajardo and get to the ferry boat and then take that to Vieques.

The hell that is the Fajardo ferry boat ride next time.