We Take the High Road

The day broke carless, but we rectified that in short order. I showed up at 9:00 to pick up the car, and by 10:00 it was ours. (The people ahead of me in line had damagaed their car and were arguing about it; then the car they had on hand smelled of smoke and hadn't been cleaned, so I had them get another.) It's a Hyundai of indeterminate model. Little. Silver. Ours.

By 11:00, we were on the road to the mall, which is about 6 minutes from our house when you have a car and know where you're going. That's right, the same Plaza Las Americas that took me a couple of hours to get to on the bus. I tell you, I'm this close to becoming a socialist. Watch what becomes of my powers THEN. We bought a booster seat for Quinn at Sears ($20), a power cord for the portable DVD player we brought, and had lunch, which Janneke had made and packed. And over lunch and dessert, we decided what to do with our first day of mobility.

Most of the good national parks and forests are out, because they're only open Wednesday through Sunday. And Ponce is a little too far away at an hour and a half. The slim little guide book I had bought had precious little to say about the highlands, which are right there uphill from us and easily drive-through-able, so I scooted over to Borders to read the better guide books' sections on the subject.

I wound up just plain re-buying the book I'd left in Massachusetts. Silly, I know, but I'm familiar with it and after browsing through a few, I really prefer its organization and style. And it has a lot to say about the highlands, suggesting a scenic route that starts about 15 minutes south of San Juan. Off we went!

The scenic route is scenic, but very, very, very windy. Tess has a history of car sickness, so we tried to take it as slowly as we could, and to take frequent breaks, climbing out to take pictures or look around at things. The farther you get out of San Juan, the more you feel like you're in a familiar Latin American country - houses crowded so close to the road that they serve as guardrails, garbage liberally dumped just about everywhere on the route, semi-stray dogs, farms and houses on steep, steep hills where only the desperate would build. And yet signs of being an American protectorate abounded as well - frequent postings about the fines for littering, certain businesses whose signs are always in English ("Laundromat", for example), clean-as-a-whistle McDonalds or Burger King popping up outside of very small little hamlets.

The temperature dropped considerably, though it was still warm, and the terrain was very steep, made up of little sharp mountains that occasionally leap up out of a running ridge to form a Pope's-hat-type promontory, covered in scrub. We saw very little that could really be called "forest" - this is definitely a densely populated island, and anywhere that can be cultivated, has been. The rest is mostly pastured, although we had to get pretty far from San Juan before we saw a cow, or a horse - I think we saw both on the same stretch of road, one right after the other. What were farms are slowly being chopped up to make little cinderblock one-story houses with bars over every window and rebar poking out the top.

And yet there were also a large number of abandoned buildings. Buildings that looked like they had never been lived in - built halfway to completion, and then left to decay, with plywood over the windows and a half-hearted "Keep out" sign. If they could get rid of all the abandonded ones and replace them with a few trees, the scenery would be improved a great deal.

Our first real stop was the town of Cayey, which we loved. It had a lively but staid main drag, where we stumbled onto a wonderful bakery / restaurant / meeting place, which sold any number of original confections that were terrifyingly good. I had a doughnut as big as my forearm with cheese in the middle (I didn't know about the cheese until halfway in), rolled in sugar, and could feel my arteries contracting even as I smelled it. Tess had three percent of a doughnut she didn't like, but she finished Quinn's yellow sponge cake. And all three of us had a pineapple soda called "Old Colony Pina", with a design that included a man in a three-corner hat and an exploding pineapple. Which was my first soda in something like 7 weeks, and which I only had in the interest of science. I mean, come on - Pineapple soda? You expect me not to try that? Janneke, again, had nothing, proving her moral superiority in no uncertain terms. Although we did buy a red cake-looking concoction called "Matahambre", to be consumed at some further point. I can hardly wait. The place was just hopping, though, and seemed like exactly the sort of small-town backwater hole-in-the-wall that novels spanning three generations could take place in.

Back in the car for the drive to Aibonito, which we had arbitrarily set forth as our end point. The plan was then to turn around and head back to eat at one of the roadside "lechoneras", or pig-roasteries, closer to San Juan. And everything would have turned out that way, probably, except that about two-thirds of the way between Cayey and Aibonito, the curving road got to Tessie. And up she chucked.

VERY strangely, we pulled over at the first wide spot in the road, which turned out to be a mirador (overlook) mentioned in one of the guide books. We sent Quinn, who was almost as traumatized as Tessie, down the stairs to admire the view while Janneke and I swarmed about like MASH unit medics, pulling Tessie out of the gore, then out of her clothes, and then pulling the seat out of the car and trying to make cleaning implements out of several items that were not originally meant for such duty. It was pretty grisly. But Tess' mood improved quickly, and soon we had her dressed in Quinn's swimming trunks and...Well, that's it. We didn't have an extra shirt. Tess climbed into her car seat, and we drove on to Aibonito, where the map, up to now accurate, said there would be less-curvy options for gettting back to the main highway. And probably food.

Aibonito isn't especially bonito. But as you draw closer to it, the houses are spaced farther apart, and the landscape is made up of a far, far greater percentage of downright forest. It started to be really beautiful - and the people of Aibonito somehow managed to outdo the other Puerto Ricans we've met for niceness. We stopped at the big grocery store in town to buy scented wipes, air freshener, and, hopefully, a shirt for Tessie, but they had no clothing for sale. But the cashiers started rummaging around like mad in the lost and found bins for us, looking for a shirt, and even called around to see if any of the clothing places they knew of in town were open at 6:00. None were, but they get big points for trying. We decided to just explain the situation to the folks at whichever restaurant we found in Aibonito, and hope they didn't mind a shirtless 3-year-old girl eating there.

So in we walked through the door of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant with the hand-written and liberally misspelled menu where we decided to eat, looking sheepish, carrying a half-naked kid. And the woman who greeted us scurried into the back and came back with a shirt of her daughter's - "Pa'que no este desnuda la pobre." We thanked her gushingly, ordered simple fare (mofongo, arroz con abichuelas, pollo a la milanesa), and settled in to eat.

The food was great, the atmosphere adorable, the directions to the highway impeccable.

And to top it all off, the woman made us keep the shirt! "Pa' que no tenga frio, la pobre." We were astonished. I told her, "Had we known that, we all would have walked in naked." I think she's not used to that sort of sense of humor, because she hid her face as she cackled and collapsed a bit against one of the pillars in the middle of the room. We were all grinning, and she was still repeating my wisecrack to anyone in earshot, as we piled into the car and drove home.

Uneventful drive home, thank goodness. We downright know our way around San Juan - at least, how to get south and back to the house. Rolled right up like we'd been doing it all our lives.

Knock, on, wood.



Church "bells" in Cayey



OK, the bells are fake.
But the fountain is real.



The bakery in Cayey where we had our snack



Bar stool seating at the bakery.
(Yes, you could buy beer there.)
(No, I didn't.)



Picking our poison



"Matahambre"



The highlands



The wife in the highlands



Supper in Aibonito, Tess in her new shirt.
(That Quinn is such a poser.)