saturday

yay, cave park! bill was feeling better, so we closed up shop at the apartment, said goodbye to the owners, and drove west towards aricebo. i was nervous that we wouldn't be able to get in, becuase all the travel sites i'd seen about it encouraged getting there early and calling to make reservations (which apparently they don't take, so wtf?) and all that, but i needn't have worried, there was hardly anyone there. nobody loves spelunking, apparently, except for sealkitty, and she wasn't there.

they showed us a terribly boring film first, which told us that we would be totally overwhelmed. thus excited, we were ushered onto a tram which drove us past a large number of golden orb weaver ("banana") spiders, which, if you like spiders, are really wonderful creatures, and if you don't like spiders, would make you cry.

we got to the entrance of the first (and, it turned out, only) cave that we would visit, clara cave.

the cave opens into a massive chamber, with a bunch of features, the names of which i've largely forgotten, which doesn't matter, becuase the pictures all sucked. i mean, we were in a cave. we were constantly being reminded not to touch any of the formations, as it can take a hundred years for a stalactite to grow "a single cube of an inch" as our guide kept putting it, and they told us in no uncertain terms to NOT TOUCH THE WATER IN THE CAVE, but it wasn't until we'd reached the other side of the chamber that they bothered to tell us why; apparently the little cavelake contained a species of shrimp found nowhere else, shrimp which were blind and colorless and microscopic, making them almost as boring as the film we'd seen, and touching the water might kill them with the oils and stuff on our hands. and the thing was, the walkway and the handrails were right the hell across this little lake, so duh, how many of these precious creatures perished during construction? we decided that the shrimps used to be four inches long with a system of written language, and the handrail placement had devolved them to their current state. when questioned, bill claimed that he was not overwhelmed, but was definitely whelmed. so far, so good.

the chamber opened on the other side to a (sink?)hole, with the camuy river at the bottom. they led us back through another area of the chamber, the pictures of which also came out like shite, but which was really amazing to look at. then they dragged us back topside and we reboarded the tram for the ride over to the tres pueblos sinkhole, which if i remember right is 400-some feet deep and 600-some feet across, and which has cave entrances which put you back in the system and about an eight-hours' walk back into the cave where we'd started. websites and travel guide entries about the area (not to mention BoredomFilm2004) all show stairs and raised walkways, which as far as we've been able to tell, are somewhere in this sinkhole. we were looking forward to being pushed over the edge into overwhelment (um, but not literally, you understand...) apparently our guide didn't feel we could handle the excitement, however, as she let us out on a platform overlooking the sinkhole, gave us approximately 60 seconds to observe its wonders, and then herded us back onto the tram for the ride back to the visitor center. that was pretty much it, except for the small and most definitely underwhelming display of preserved animals, some of even all of which might possibly be found in the park, it never was made clear.

mmm, delicious 100% natural... bat.

it was still fairly early in the day, so we drove the twenty minutes or so to the aricebo radio observatory (as seen in the hit movie contact!) there we paid 8 bucks to watch a movie so dull it made the cave park movie look oscar-worthy, and then stood around for upwards of several minutes looking out over the expanse of the radio dish. it was cool, but you know, it's a dish. it really only provides so much entertainment.

so we drove back to san juan to await our flight; we window-shopped in condado and bought my brother a bottle of rum, and me a box of teddy grahams for the flight, which resulted in my being the target of abuse in the liquor store ("mmm, teddy grahams and rum," bill said.  "dinner!" said the guy behind him helpfully,) and then endured a frantic and death-defying drive around san juan looking for the airport.

save the pukage and the last-minute freakout/drive, it was a really good trip.

friday

at no time during or after my intestinal trials last weekend did i give voice to the nagging suspicion that bill would turn to me at some point this week, wearing a look of unbridled disgust, and then make a mad dash for the bathroom. i mean, three of four family members had suffered this fate, so it kinda stood to reason, you know? but fearing that saying so would set it in stone, i kept quiet.

still, it was no surprise when i woke this morning, expecting that we would drive out to the camuy cave park for a brief affair with my love, geology, that i found bill down on the couch looking unhappy. the puking, you see, had already begun.

it's a little after two in the afternoon now, and from what i can tell he may finally have fallen asleep in the bed; his illness has followed the course of my own to the letter, including the part where he looked at me after emerging from the bathroom and said somewhat sheepishly, "now i know what you mean about puking into the garbage can..." poor guy, i sure do know how hard this sucks, and i can't do a thing for him.

i myself have lazed around all day, reading in the hammock, napping in the hammock, napping on the couch, and blogging here in the kitchen while sucking down unadvisable amounts of haagen-dazs chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream. there's still a possilbility, i assume, that we will make it out to the cave park tomorrow (our flight doesn't leave until around 8pm, so we have most of the day to do something, but i think weekends are a lot heavier in terms of visitors and they limit the number that go through the caves each day, so...) but even if we don't, i'm not disappointed; we had a good time, and i am very very glad we came.

now i will go have a nap.

thursday

i loved today. although i am not an outdoorsy person, i cannot get enough of the beach. can. not. we went out in the morning with our host-man, bob, who gives surfing lessons and who, accordign to both his wife and their website, guarantees to "get you up". sign me up, baby.

i have long imagined that i was supposed to have been born in california, and except for the fact that i would've combusted into a crispy little pile of dust decades ago, i still suspect that to be the case. i love east coast life, adn at this late stage of the game i seriously doubt i could make such a drastic change in environment, but i'd give it heavy consideration if it meant i could live on a beach and surf everyday. i've never actually been surfing, but it's always been very high on my list.

bill decided to take a lesson as well, which surprised me since he had shown little interest in trying it himself in the months leading up to this trip, when i'd be sitting nearby and idly sing-songing "i'm gonna go suuuurfing, i'm gonna be coooo-oool" or some bastardized version of surfin' USA, which usually went something along the lines of "bill smells like dooooooody! surfin' u-s-a!"

in any case, bob lead us down to a local beach a block or so from their surf shop (oh right; they own a surf shop) and said that for our purposes - which is to say, getting us into the water and standing up - he wasn't going to go into details like paddling out and all that, which while important aspects of the sport, were also time-consuming and not what he assumed we wanted to do. check and check, bob-o. basically, he tossed each of us a tool-of-the-trade lycra shirt (ostensibly to protect against sun and board-rash, but which in my case also protected against, i am so not kidding, a wardrobe malfunction which kept my right boob more or less completely unbathingsuited the entire time, bahaha, oh the irony), gave us a little ground instruction on standing up on the board, and then he dragged us out into the surf and pushed us off on the whitewater to practice doing it. i am proud to say that bill and i did indeed both get it up, and i was absolutely thrilled witht he whole process and more convinced than ever that i am supposed to be a beach bum somewhere. bob seemed pleased with several of my attempts, despite the really weird stance i had on the board at all times, and the frequent sweeping arm-movements to try to stay up. he asked more than once if i was sure i hadn't surfed before; the first time seemed natural enough, a common-enough expression of compliment. but after that it just sounded dumb, like, no, bozo, i already said i hadn't! or maybe i'm just testy. whatever, i had so much fun. i got killed by the surf, though; they weren't gentle waves and there were alot of them, and after just a couple trips out and back, i wasn't so much assisting bob with bringing the board out as i was being towed by him; every wave dragged me back and left me gasping and exhausted, and today i am very very sore, espeically my arms. but oh. so. worth it.

it wasn't even noon when we quit; bill and i went back to the apartment for lunch, a nap, and some nasty business, and after regreasing ourselves with sunscreen we headed back out to the balneario in luquillo, one of puerto rico's public-access beaches. although i always look forward to going to the beach, the term "public beach" tends to put a certain image in my head; in new jersey for example, it refers to places like seaside or point pleasant, where there is no admission and thick throngs of sweaty awful people cram like sardines onto mere inches of sand and roll around waiting gamely (and stinking similarly) for their turn to flop unattractively in the cold brown waters of the atlantic, or as it might be more accurately described, mahattan's toilet. although i was expecting something a little more tropical-looking from this beach, i wasn't figuring on anything too different in terms of body count and generally unpleasant glimpses of humanity.

i could not have been more wrong. after crossing the public facilities area - neat shower heads and covered picnic tables and park benches and playgrounds and palm trees and short-clipped grass - we stepped onto the beach itself, a seemingly endless stretch of white sand and blue protected water; the waves broke so far out they almost rode the horizon, and nothing but gently-lapping foam hit the shore. the beach was almost empty of visitors, and those few there were kept quietly to themselves, leaving bill and me to wander aimlessly along the beach towards a point of sand which i decided to be particularly attractive. the area was labeled as no swimming, assumably due to the deeper, fast-moving channel of water that separated the three-foot deep shore water from the sandbar farther out, but no sign was going to keep me out of that ocean, dammit. the beach behind us was studded with palmtrees, and if i haven't specifically mentioned it before, my whole life's goal has been to find myself on a beach with palm trees; that all on its own made the trip worth it, and we were completely alone, save the occasional jogger or wandering couple. we swam for a bit, and then started to walk back, towards the sun which was setting behind a cloud-shrouded mountain off in the distance. i mean, damn.

i think monday was bill's favorite day, but i think today was mine. it was just about as good as it gets, in my opinion.

wednesday

the short of it is, i have no pictures for you today. none. zero. zilch. [post-production note I:  this, as you can see, is a lie.  however it is true in that i have no original pictures for you.]

the long of it is, that bitching and moaning and bronze-horse's-ass-fingering notwithstanding, i do enjoy visits to art museums, and not solely for the point-and-laugh value of some of the modern pieces. i don't Appreciate Art in the standard sense, but when i happen upon something i like, i appreciate the hell out of it. such was the case when i saw, however long ago, a print of flaming june, a piece i find just lovely in several regards. a number of years ago, bill bought me a copy of it for christmas, and it hangs in the diningroom, where i see it every day. thousands of times now i have laid eyes on it. and so you'd think that at some point, it would've entered my consciousness that across the bottom in fairly bold lettering are the words "museo de arte de ponce". not that i necessarily would've stopped to consider where ponce was; my impression of art housed in european-sounding museums is that it is, in fact, in europe, and therefore generally far-removed from my list of things to do, but the point is, you'd think i might have at elast had it in the back of my mind somewehre, so that when we arrived here and the hostlady mentioned the town of ponce, something would've clicked.

but no. i'm as thick as a nuclear containment facility, and it took three days and several separate half-conscious leafings through the "puerto rico in winter" magazine on the counter before i happened upon the picture of flaming june, and the attendant article aobut the various works of art housed in - go ahead and sing along - the museo de arte de ponce, located just as one might have expected, across the island in ponce. this revelation came complete with some level of hopping about and asking bill, "oooh! ooh! can we go? can we? huh? huh? can we?" and was eventually met with approval.

so we got ourselves up and out the door fairly early (oh no, wait. we were supposed to do that; in reality we didn't actually hit the road until after 11. but who cares! we're on vacation!) and followed the highway around the east coast of the island and then down along the south (passing some of the most spectacular ocean/mountain vistas i've ever seen, and i even asked bill to stop on the way back for some photos, which he never quite did, thinking that i was going to yell out at some point, "STOP HERE!" - "here" ususally being a precariously-perched overlook with barely enough room park a car in the first place, much less bring one to a screeching halt at the drop of a hat, but we won't cast blame here, no we won't - and i believing that having already asked once, he was merely waiting to find somewhere he found to be an appropriate mix of beautiful and parkable) to ponce, where we drove around in circles for a bit before happening upon the right avenue.

it's not a large museum, and for reasons that never were adequately revealed to me, not only was picture-taking prohibited, but they confiscated my damn camera at the entrance, so i couldn't forge ahead and break the rules anyway. damn paranoid artsy-fartsy jerkheads. most of the art housed there was of the jesus-mary-and-saints variety, representing various schools and time periods, and most of it didn't interest me much. there were a few pieces which i did find, if not beautiful per se, then most certainly eye-catching, and i was disappointed that i couldn't show them to you. hopefully when i make it back to the land of the internet connection, i will be able to find them online, although experience has proven that reproduction art just doens't do justice to the real thing, and the most captivating thing i saw was nearly three-dimentional in its rendering, which i'm sure wouldn't have shown at all in photos anyway. but i digress, as usual, and i'm sure i'm not telling all you anything you didn't already know. [post-production note II:  even the museum's website didn't have most of the pieces i wanted to show you. it figures.]

flaming june was just as wonderful as i'd hoped it would be - i had to go all the way to paris to look at van goghs to really get the difference between print art and the real thing, and i admit to having developed an affinity for certain really really buttugly paintings since then, based solely on the way the paint was sitting on the canvas - and it was larger than i'd expected, unlike a least one blogger who shall remain nameless, but who i suspect is, even at this moment, oinking his objections. my only disappointment was that it was the only of leighton's works to be displayed there, and i would have liked to see others, especially becuase holy shit, just how many lamentations of the christ can you really look at in one afternoon before it becomes just another dead guy?

we were also treated to two (of the apparently many) representations of "roman charity", a story with which i was previously unfamiliar, and which i wish i still were; evidently this guy, who of course i don't remember who it was, was senteced to starve to death in prison, but was allowed visitation by his daughter, who had recently given birth, and was therefore able to sustain her father at her own breast, until she was caught doing so, and judged to be so brave that the old man was released from prison. ah, that's a happy story and it gives me the willies something awful, and also, the painting we saw of it was so comically grotesque that i won't ever shake it out of my head. i bought a copy of it on a little card to send to BM and matty, since they shouldn't be excused from the horror over something as simple as a broken toe. [post-production note III:  i have since sought some other versions of this, and none of them were as grossly comical as this one.  the old man's rolling eyeballs are especially unpleasant.  ew.]

if i had a point in there somewhere, it's all gone bye-bye now.

there was also a small collection of modern works by puerto rican artists, including a large hanging skeletal wooden airplane with what appeared to be a ball of crap attached to its nose; there was no placard telling us what this was, or who was responsible for it, but in any case it got lumped, so to speak, with craphenge in our journal of doody art. i found one painting there that i liked very much, called the empty basket (the translation back into spanish is one i have forgotten), and bill found two that he enjoyed, his take on them being "these must be the two least artistically-valuable paintings in this place, becuase i really like them both." word.

we then drove the nearly-three hours back home, stopping first at the supermarket for frozen pizzas (note to self and concerned others: red baron frozen pizza is about as appetizing as "roman charity") and a bottle of gallo turning leaf merlot (note: see red baron, above) whose entire purpose was to get us goofy enough for bed. i also complained loudly about the dorkwad that made it through to the next round of idol in place of jennifer(?) the cute chick with the afro, who was waaaay better than either him or fantasia, who just freaking annoys me, with her noisy head and her big braless bouncing. the end.

[post-production note IV:  i logged on this morning to be informed that, after having my plan foiled and uploading all my pictures to matty's site anyway, i'm being given a three-week free premium.  i shoulda known.]