Police Escorts: Not Just for the Kennedys Any More

Today, although we have a car, we did not travel away from San Juan. The last few days of travel had left us all yawning, shaky wrecks, so we decided to take advantage of having a car IN San Juan by doing the grocery shopping with it and hitting our favorite local beach without having to take the bus. Relax, relax, relax was the order of the day.

But the morning wasn't as relaxing as all that, for a couple of reasons. Quinn woke up pretty sore still on the left side of his neck fron snorkeling, and broke into tears about it every ten minutes or so. So we put a heating pad on and let him watch cartoons, which both eased the pain and staunched the flow of tears. But his health crisis (everything health-related, in Quinn's eyes, is potentially fatal and deserving of a crisis) kept us all on edge a bit.

Janneke decided she would rather walk to do the shopping, so she and Tess did their usual trip to Pueblo. First, though, they went to the bank to take out money, and the ATM (or ATH, which here stands for "a toda hora") ate her card. So she had to talk to the bankers who had her fill out a form and gave her the card back. But in all the card talk, Janneke realized that her credit card was not there. She thought back to the last time she used it: At El Yunque, yesterday, to buy tee shirts for the kids. From a very unfriendly woman, the second such person we've seen in Puerto Rico, who never verbally responded to any of the several times during the interaction that Janneke said "Gracias". And who, it seems, never gave Janneke back her card.

She got home and called the credit card company, and guess what: $1,500 dollars of charges since yesterday, on things like jewelry. She got hold of someone to report it stolen, who said that she would not be responsible for those charges. Our hearts were flying there for a while. Major crisis averted, we settled in for lunch.

Lunch was great.

Post-lunch, we all got dressed to head to the beach, and each child suffered a separate meltdown, resulting in a lot of screeching and tears in the car on the way to the beach. And once at the beach, storm clouds rolled in. Lovely. Janneke, who of the two was probably most in need of some me-time, volunteered to stay in the shelter of a small building with the perishables while the rest of the family hit the water, where, if it did rain, we'd be warm.

The beach itself, called "Escambron", is very popular, with a huge parking lot right next to it, and it's the dirtiest beach we've seen yet. Cups and forks and juice boxes and the ever-present cigarrette butts...The walk to the water was turning my stomach and raising my blood pressure at the same time. I take it so personally when people don't take the time to think of others...! But once we hit the water, we were fine. The kids splashed and bobbed, and Quinn forgot all about his sore neck. He ran back to Janneke and collected his snorkeling equipment, and soon he was squealing with delight, because this beach is a bit rocky, and around those rocks there are gobs and gobs of fish. (Although I believe the technical word for a group of fish is a "senate".)

Before too long, the rain passed us by, and Janneke emerged from the shadows to set up shop on the beach. I donned my own snorkeling equipment, and Quinn and I did some poking about in the nearby rocks, where I am delighted to report my first sighting ever of a wild octopus. About the size of a hefty plum, squeezing its way back under a sizeable rock, poking out every so often to see if I was still there, blending in almost perfectly to its surroundings. Gorgeous. I didn't tell Quinn, because I knew he wouldn't have the patience to keep after it, and the frustration of not seeing it would probably be hard to take.

Tess bobbed in the surf and played in the sand while Janneke and I took turns snorkeling out along a protective ring of rocks that keeps the beach waveless. We saw all sorts of fish, and some gorgeous coral. It's not like Acapulco snorkeling - I mean, hey, it's a public beach in San Juan. If it ever had been pristine, it was long ago contaminated enough to render it so-so. But for Quinn, it was out of this world, and for Janneke and I, who hadn't snorkeled since before the kids were born, it was fantastic. We found a few of these common sea creatures, like a sand dollar but shaped like a pin cushion - long dead, of course - and brought them back in for the kids, along with lots of sea glass, a crab claw, and a snorkel. Big fun.

Quinn was experimenting with different strokes as he played with the mask on - grasping both ankles behind his back and floating for as long as he could (OK, not really a stroke), doing the overhead crawl stroke, seeing how far he could go underwater, DIVING down for rocks...His body is learning like mad, and it's so much fun to watch.

Tess is fearless. She swallows a lot of water every time we go swimming, but keeps right on at it. We finally feel confident enough to sit and watch her swimming from the shore. Quinn was giving her piggy-back rides at one point. It was such fun.

We closed up shop and headed back to the car, where, just as I was about to enter, I dropped one of the pin-cushion things and uttered an expletive. When they're dry, those things shatter like champagne glasses. We all piled into the car and headed home.

I didn't want to go back the way we'd come, so I headed to a parallel street that would be much faster, and would have merged onto it beautifully, except that as the traffic sweeps off to the right, there's an even MORE rightward exit possibility that I thought must be even closer to Ponce de Leon, the street I was kind of aiming for. Sure enough, it comes right out on Ponce - only I had forgotten (and there had been no sign indicating this) that the east-bound lane of Ponce is strictly for the bus. There are two west-bound lanes, but only one east-bound, and I now found myself driving down it. We went a couple of blocks, thinking we would turn left to get out of this and over to a street more like the one I'd been imagining, but every time we hit an intersection, it was one-way and we couldn't go down it. Another couple of blocks, and what should happen but a police car comes west down Ponce, sees us, and turns on its lights.

I should say here that I had previously accused the Puerto Rican police of abusing their lights, but in this instance, they were used exactly as they should be. I know, because I broke out in a sweat and my heart rate skyrocketed.

He signaled for us to pull over, which we did, and to roll down the window, which I did. And I said to him, "We're trying to get off, we really are, but all these streets are one-way, and we can't!" He asked where we were going. "Condado." "Follow me. Turn around and follow me." And so we U-turned across two lanes of oncoming traffic and followed the police car, lights still going, back exactly where we'd come from. I had never driven with a police escort before - it was neat, I have to say. The sense of entitlement coupled with relief and giddiness at not being in troubel made it kind of like riding in a funeral procession, only it's a funeral where the dead person miraculously jumped out of the casket, alive. I think that the "Rent Me!" sign on the front of our car, plus my fairly obvious non-Puerto Rican-ness, had flipped the "hospitality" switch in their minds, and they had been helpless to do anything but bend heaven and earth to make sure we got home safe.

We came to a light, and he motioned for me to pull up beside him, which I did. "Take this roundabout, and when you come back, go across that bridge." "Thank you!" we cheerily replied, and waved. And when we came back around, we went exactly the way I had gone before, only this time I didn't go down Ponce. And we made it home much faster than we would have if we had taken the bridge.

When we got home, I gingerly placed the three remaining pincushion shells on the glass table of the dining room, and started to walk away. But I thought, A kid could come by and grab at them and ruin them. I should at least move them to the center of the table, where that won't happen. And in so doing, I knocked the mid-sized one off the table, and it shattered.

I howled out an expletive - surprising myself, really, at how strongly I reacted - and Janneke came running out, hand over her heart, to see what new crisis had befallen us. Had I lost my credit card now? Had we forgotten something vital somewhere? Had I lost the car keys? Were the police now at the door...?

Nope, just the broken shell. Let's breathe deeply. Hoooooooooo. Everything's fine. We're A-OK.

Tomorrow, we're going to head back south, to a place on the other side of Ponce (I get to drive over the island again! Huzzah!), where a ferry takes you out a few hundred yards to "Gilligan's Island", a little atoll with a shallow lagoon that's perfect for snorkeling. Can not WAIT.

No pictures from today, unfortunately - we were so emotionally frazzled by the time we hit the road that we left it behind, and in such a state of blissful rest at the beach that we didn't even realize we'd left it behind until I saw it on the edge of our bed when we got home. So little evidence to back up what I'm saying. But in the spirit of inspiring our generous hosts to improve their signage, here's some that we have seen.



Sign: Jesus Christ, done in style of Coca Cola.
Purpose: To proclaim belief, and to piss off atheists.
Effectiveness: 100% on the one, 25% on the other. (We
thought it was funny, but thought so in a snarky,
huffy kind of way.)



This one says, "No mas tiros al aire. En respeto
a la vida, ni una bala perdida" ("No more shooting
in the air. In respect for life, not one more stray
bullet.")
Purpose: To prevent random bullet injuries and death.
(Or at least to improve people's aim.)
Effectiveness: One landed in my coffee mug during
our snack, and another went through our map as we stood
in front of the PONCE sign. So, I'd say 50%.