Ship ship ship

Substitute a ‘t’ for the ‘p’, of course.

Thank goodness we’re in Puerto Rico where it’s way easier to send things off to America. Except that we don’t have a car anymore. We dinghied over to the little fishing club next to the yacht club because the yacht club wants to charge $10 per person per day (!) and we refuse to pay that. Luckily the little fishing club is perfectly happy to let us tie up to their dock for free. The guy we met on the dock, though, told us we’d be better off taking the dinghy over to the other side of the harbor and tying up to the police dock where we’d be much closer to the post office. So we got back in the dinghy, rode over to the police dock where a friendly but heavily armed homeland security officer told us that no, we couldn’t tie up there, and also it wasn’t safe to tie up anywhere along that shoreline. Hmmm. He directed us to another tiny marina we’d barely noticed and said the owner is an American and very nice.

When we got to that marina a tall man with a Texas accent invited us to tie up and said he was about to drive in our direction and offered us a lift. His name is David and he’s a cameraman so we had lots to talk about as we drove and drove and drove and we got happier and happier that we weren’t walking this.

At the post office we packed up the autopilot and the clerk promised us it would get to New Hampshire on Monday. As soon as it was out of my hands my stress level went down a couple hundred points and we ambled our way back towards the boat, stopping in various stores along the way. We wanted to hook up with my cousin Jackie so we searched for a place we could email him from and that he could find easily. We settled on a Burger King, not my favorite place but it was on an easy corner. We got lunch and I fired off an email.

Why don’t we have a cell phone, you ask? Good question. This has been the bane of our cruising existence and we still haven’t sorted it out yet. At a couple of islands we bought local SIM cards for one of our unlocked phones, and we did the same when we flew back to Miami. But the phone that takes the regular size SIM died and we’re left with two unlocked iPhone 4s that take the miniSIMs. Those you can’t pick for cheap in the corner store. There are plenty of phone companies here but they all want a contract which of course we can’t do. We’ve explained our dilemma countless times whenever we see a phone kiosk but everyone just shrugs and says they can’t help us. So we have no phone. Or rather we have two phones we can’t use. Other cruisers seem to have worked this out with no problem, so we’re open to suggestions.

Anyway, we ate lunch at Burger King but didn’t hear back from Jackie so we continued on our way back toward the boat. As we got close to the Caribe Mall we recognized a little cafe we’d stopped at during the weeks we were in Salinas and had a car. Just as we walked past I heard someone calling, “Marce!” and there was my cousin Jose at the cafe door, looking quite surprised, as were we. He and his dad Jackie were having coffee and invited us to join them. They said they knew we were at Burger King and wished they could have gotten a message to us because the cafe is so much better and we agree. We just didn’t realize how close we’d been and you know how things look different on foot than they do from a car.

We had coffee and then drove back to the funeraria with them where we met another of Jackie’s kids, Jose’s older brother Gury.

Jackie gave us a lift back to our dinghy at David’s marina. Now we just have to wait for Raymarine to pass judgement on our autopilot. It’ll be a long weekend.