The next day we left the fan­tas­tic Caribe Hilton for Fajardo so that we could hop the after­noon ferry that would take us out to the island of Vieques. The drive there was annoy­ing; stop lights, hor­ri­fy­ing traf­fic (which would plague us the major­ity of the trip), funny store front signs (Drinker’s Irish Pub, China Creme, etc.) but we finally, after get­ting lost in Fajardo, found where we could drop off our car and hop onto a shut­tle bus that would take us to the port.

Kim jumped in line while I watched the kids (Pey­ton in his stroller, Noah help­ing me out with bag­gage) and our lug­gage. Our lug­gage was mas­sive even though we had tried to pack as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. What we had -

1) 1 large suit­case hold­ing all of our clothes
2) 1 large suit­case hold­ing a)scuba equip­ment b)books c)toiletries
3) 1 back­pack hold­ing a)reading mate­ri­als b)electronics includ­ing mp3 play­ers, cam­eras, a lap­top c)more toi­letries d) 20 DVDs
4) 1 large bag of tow­els
5) 2 bags of food from the Wal-Mart of Fajardo

Sad to say we were sorely weighted down by all of this and I wasn’t at lithe and cat-like when push­ing Peyton’s stroller and had 2 bags hang­ing off of its han­dles. My top speed, in a crowd, was ter­ri­ble. These bags weighed sev­eral hun­dred pounds when car­ried together.

As the after­noon wore on we heard, from Span­ish speak­ers, that the inter­com had announced that the ferry was run­ning late by roughly 2 hours. The kids by this point were tired and bored and Kim and I were snippy and tired too.

Fast for­ward 2 hours…

The rush to the gate to get onto the ferry was like last-helicopter-out-of-Saigon crazy. One large mass of peo­ple fun­nel­ing them­selves through a sin­gle gate while try­ing, by any means nec­es­sary it seemed, to get in front of the peo­ple who were in front of them. In the States some­one with chil­dren and a stroller will usu­ally be shown some kind of cour­tesy since the those peo­ple are hav­ing a harder time with their load; not in Puerto Rico. The every-man-for-himself atti­tude pre­cluded any such soci­etal cour­te­sies. Young and old tried with all of their might to some­how get in front of me, forc­ing me and the kids fur­ther and fur­ther back as Kim, with her bags, moved forward.

We didn’t know if they’d over­sold this ferry, so my annoy­ance at these peo­ple turned to near panic the fur­ther I moved toward the rear of the mob. Would Kim get on the ferry and I’d be left with the chil­dren in Fajardo? I can’t speak Span­ish worth a damn, so this thought started to make me a lit­tle less car­ing as to who I stepped over or ran over their feet with Peyton’s stroller. This back­bone would be needed the rest of the trip as the Puerto Rican peo­ple don’t fol­low the rules as usual Amer­i­cans would.

Finally giv­ing me peace, we made it onto the ferry and found Kim. The ferry took us and hour and a half and we arrived at the ferry port in Isabel Segunda. We were sup­posed to meet one of the house man­agers, Cheo, there and he found us. His dread­locks and mas­sive beard was my first look at island life; on an island with an over 50% drop out rate we’d see many more peo­ple like Cheo. He was nice this first night but we’d learn pretty soon that Cheo could be an angry man.