Vieques Day 2
While my trusty sidekick makes a great traveling companion, the one area that sets us at odds is the relationship between vacations and mornings. She is firmly in the camp that says vacation is for relaxing, and relaxing means not feeling obligated to get out of bed until you are damn good and ready. I live on the other end of the spectrum, which says if you are going to stay in bed all morning, you don’t need to fly to a place 10 hours away to do that.
With the boys trending towards their Mom (most notably our soon to be teenager), it is nearly 11 before all hands are ready to leave the room (some of us significantly grumpier about it than others). Any organized excursion has long since departed by that time, so we again head down to the beach for a repeat of yesterday’s action.
After a few hours, the kids are begging to go back to the room, in part because they are bored, but more to get their hands back on their electronic devices, which they are starting to show signs of withdrawal from.
There’s no conceivable way I can sit in the room all day, so figuring that, with it being Saturday, the island will be busier, and a bright idea would be walking to town to see what there is to do. It is a couple miles away, but Ang and I decide it will be good to get a bit of exercise and that it will be fairly easy to get a cab back out to the hotel, hopefully with something we can feed the kids a bit more exciting than turkey sandwiches.
The walk in goes more or less as planned, but as we get to town, we realize things are beyond dead. Any place that might have been open is in the process of closing by the time we roll in around 4 pm. Looking at the number of vacant shops and the condition of many of the buildings, I’m not sure how jumping the place might be on a regular day, but today, tumbleweeds blowing down the street wouldn’t be out of place.
Fortunately, the grocery store is still open, so we pick up a few things (mostly nice, heavy liquids which feel great in my backpack) and head back to a pizza place we spotted on the way in. We figure we’ll get a hot pizza, jump in a cab with the heavy pack and be back at the hotel before it gets cold.
As it turns out, William’s Pizza is out of pizza today (huh?) and there isn’t a single cab to be found. Two miles sounds a whole lot less appealing now than it did on the way in, but with no other options, we suck it up and start back.
The one place with signs of life on this day is the chicken boxing stadium about halfway between our hotel and town, and shortly after passing it, we finally come across some cabs (no point waiting for a fare in town when everybody is at the fights). The driver wants to charge us the same price we paid yesterday to go all the way from town, but by this stage we’re in no place to argue, so climb aboard for the short drive.
Not surprisingly, the boys are exactly where we left them – Nick hunched over his Kindle, Joey with the iPad, and Sam watching some mindless cartoon. Video games and TV on vacation rank up there with sleeping in for me (and fortunately my other half concurs with me on this one), so come hell or high water we’re getting out of the hotel in the morning and finding something to do.