Thank You Card #8
This past February I turned 30 years old, and while I thought this milestone would be a terrifying herald of my mortality and I’d wake up all gray and wrinkled and arthritic with the Reaper at my bedside, it turned out when I woke up I could recognize no more signs of my advancement toward old age than I could the day before. Huh…weird. And even if I had woken up all senescent and on the edge of this life and whatever comes next, I would have been grateful to have been able to have lived out my last days in Puerto Rico. Yes, the sting of turning 30 was muted by the turquoise ocean, hot sand, and warm breeze of Palmas del Mar, on the southeast coast of the island.
In what could only be described as the best Christmas gift ever, my Dad and stepmom Hazel had invited Tom and I go to with them (along with my brother Adam, stepbrother Michael, and Dad and Hazel’s friend Danny) to spend a week in a gorgeous condo on the beach in February. I had to think for a second about whether I could go because I had a dissertation proposal to write. After literally a second’s thought, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t write my dissertation proposal in Puerto Rico. As you can tell from earlier posts, I’m excited about my dissertation. I have that sense of unbridled optimism about it that one can only have about a research project that’s still in its pilot stages and you can envision data that is collected quickly and easily and—like the best magic ever!—is supportive of all your predictions. (Ah, if only…). This is all to say that I enjoy working on it, and this enjoyment is motivating. So while I couldn’t envision myself with my laptop on the beach, I could imagine writing in the evenings after returning from the beach, and at night after everyone else fell asleep (which is exactly what I ended up doing). But now I realize I’ve managed to make a post about an insanely fun vacation suddenly about my boring life as a grad student, so let me just stop right here and show you some pictures while I collect myself and focus on writing words about fun things. Fun things, not work; fun things, not work; fun things, not work…
This was the view from our condo’s balcony. You could walk to the beach in about 3 minutes.
Here’s the view from my beach chair. :) And let me just address this now, because I’m only on TYC8 but you can already see a pattern emerging in which Tom is featured in a lot of the pictures. I don’t expect this to change, and that is basically because 1. neither of us are particularly faithful about documenting our the most memorable moments of our lives in photographs, but now that I have the blog to consider, I’m slightly more likely to take a picture than I was pre-blog, and much more likely to take a picture than Tom is; and 2. he’s really cute, so why not? More pictures of Tom = better web traffic.
Here he is contemplating this particular Mojito’s place amongst the best tropical drinks he’s ever had. Was it the best? Or the second best after the Dark & Stormy he had in Bermuda? (Actually, this picture was taken right after he met The Hat, so he’s probably contemplating buying it right now and of course we all know how that turned out.)
Oh wait, here’s a picture of me! I’m actually sitting in my favorite spot in San Juan, the fortress at El Morro.
This is one of the views from up there. I really like watching cargo ships pass into and out of the bay. I probably could have stayed there all day.
Okay now that I can focus on vacation, I can tell you that our typical “vacation” day schedule was something like this: wake up, eat breakfast that Dad and Hazel made, go to the beach, take a break for lunch, go back to the beach, go home, work on the dissertation, have dinner, play some board games, work on the dissertation some more. The vacation was perfect and I’m forever grateful to my Dad and Hazel for bringing us along; to be honest, a thank you card isn’t sufficient in this case, but I will say I’m looking forward to the day when I leave grad school poverty behind and Tom and I can be the ones to give excellent Christmas gifts to our loved ones.
To top off this amazing week, Tom and I had the most fantastic adventure getting back to California. First, we boarded our American Airlines flight from San Juan to LAX, and sat there waiting on the plane while the crew addressed a mechanical issue. I had a book to read and Tom immediately passed out, so it wasn’t a big deal. After almost two hours, the powers that be decided that the part that was broken couldn’t be fixed and would have to be replaced. They let us all off the plane and told us a new part was on its way and our flight would be rescheduled for later that afternoon. They gave us some food vouchers and though you’d think that an airport is one of the least vegetarian friendly places you could be (which is usually true—cheese sandwiches for $9, salads you have to pick meat out of), this airport was different because it had an El Meson, which can be thought of as something like an oasis for vegetarians amidst the desert landscape of McDonalds and other nasty airport restaurants.
You can kinda tell how psyched Tom is about it in this photo, even though it’s blurry and far away and taken on my cell phone.
What vegetarian wouldn’t be excited about eating a reuben or Philly steak sub made with fake meat? We went there for breakfast/lunch, and then later for dinner, cause our flight never left. After about 12 hours of delays, American Airlines finally called it quits and reschedule our flight for 6 am the following day. We were given accommodations at a hotel in a hospital in not-so-nearby Bayamon, but ended up hanging out with Adam (whose flight left at 3 am the next morning) who was playing poker at the Ritz Carlton when our cab driver couldn’t find the place after driving around an industrial park for what seemed like an eternity.
We killed some time at the Ritz by watching some boxing on television in the bar and playing the slot machines. Fortune smiled upon us!
I dunno what’s up with Tom’s face here. He should be happy because look—we each won about $50 in a game where you’re not actually supposed to win! But by this point it was closing in on 2 am and we’d been awake for almost 20 hours, so you have to understand this is probably the expression of equal parts euphoria and exhaustion.
We took a taxi with Adam to the airport, and after parting ways with him, we tried to get some sleep on the terminal chairs. Tom had limited success; I had none.
The whole time I was thinking, “Yeah, this sucks…but it’s great!” because with most airlines, the worse your travel experience is, the more ammunition you have later when you complain and ask for compensation. Bad things can result in good, good things later on.
The terminal opened at 6 am (though our flight was supposed to leave at 6, so most of the passengers had started arriving at around 4 am) and because the crew wasn’t schedule to start until 7, we sat around some more, and then boarded the plane and sat around some more before we took off at around 9.
We were finally airborne 24 hours after our scheduled departure. Yay! I immediately fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we had landed in Los Angeles, where there was no gate for our plane so we…sat around some more.
I know by now you’re probably thinking, “Wait, so if you already gave out TYC8 to your family, why are you writing about this?” And that, my friends, will be answered in the next installment of this blog, which I’ll get around to writing some time this week.
