June 1-8, 2002--we took our second anniversary vacation in Puerto Rico. Seemed simple enough in theory but not quite in execution. Found a great beach villa on the internet that was located on the west coast in the town of Rincon. Had a great flight on Jet Blue (although the "satellite tv in every seat" was a no-go) and then drove across PR from San Juan to arrive at our isolated villa with no one around. Damn gorgeous! We were quite happy and enjoyed hammocking & knocking back homemade piña coladas. Real nasty storm hit that night which turned out to be quite a magnificent thing to watch as it came in across the ocean. Then the power went out--no lights, no A/C until later the next day--ugh! So we went to sleep dreaming of looters and awoke the next day to have all sorts of beach fun.

Next morning we woke to the sound of construction in the apartment below us--this was really annoying because the owner knew about this but never told us about it--grrr! Each morning we made breakfast burritos using a hot sauce made in Rincon that was the best we ever had (called Dragon's Breath by Virgin Fire--highly recommended if you can find it). We learned how to make rice and beans, PR style, using a seasoning called Sazon which in combination with Adobo is awesome! Anyways, all was really sweet and merry until after dinner we glanced at the kitchen ceiling to notice that a family of 20,000 (seriously) or so ants had decided to shack up with us for the evening. Needless to say, we freaked and ran back to the other side of the island the next day.

Back in San Juan we stayed at a laid-back tuscan-french-fusion hotel called L'Habitation in Ocean Park where we met an exceptionally friendly ex-west-villager bartender named Harold (everyone you meet in PR who is not from PR is from New York). Harold and a guest we met named Jeff raved about an island off PR called Culebra. This is apparently where PR's go to vacation. This definitely sounded like our kind of place! So after checking out Old San Juan and its forts we were off.

Culebra was seriously paradisesque. Isolated, stunningly beautiful beaches with no other tourists anywhere. We rented a jeep from crazy Jerry the Vietnam vet who gave us this map to get around. We stayed at the Culebra Beach Villas on Flamenco Beach. We loved it there, but the really killer experience was Zoni Beach (in the pictures above). It was a real adventure to get to it in the jeep but it was the most beautiful beach we've ever seen and we had it all to ourselves, all afternoon! Then we went back to our villa just in time for another power outage and to get inside before the swarm of bees arrived--5,000 maybe? Ahh... vacation :)