The evening before we left, we dropped our dogs off to my mother so she could make sure they were looked after while we were away. Our dogs love having visits with her and her animals, so it works out well.
Up before the sun, our friends, John and Chris, met us at our home to take Lexi to school and us to the airport. They had offered a few weeks before to avoid us having to pay to park a car at the airport for a week and we could not be more grateful for their help.
We arrived with plenty of time to get some breakfast and make it to our gate to wait for our flight. Traveling for work, flying has become much less exciting to me than it used to be. However, on this day, I got to sit next to my favorite person in the world, which made the trip spectacular!
Mother nature did a fabulous job of reminding us whey we chose to take our honeymoon in the winter... snowing while we waited to take off, and causing the need for two rounds of deicing before we could do so safely.
A quick check of the weather app on my phone confirmed the disparity in weather that we would soon be enjoying. A nice 55 degree gap in temperature would be a welcome change from the winter doldrums in Michigan.
After our breakfast and my morning walk on our little beach, I walked up to the hotel office to inquire about getting ourselves to Culebra for a day sometime during our visit. Culebra is the third island that makes up Puerto Rico. It is smaller yet than Vieques and we thought it might be fun to island hop to check it out. They gave me some information about the available flights and prices and I took that back to Shane to discuss. It appeared we would have to spend a whole day on the island, taking a 9am flight and returning at 5pm, so we would want to be sure of our plan. While the woman spoke with someone at the airline (you have to take an air taxi to get there from Vieques or spend 3 hours on ferries each way - no thanks!), I noticed this great old sign with the original beach names and the new ones assigned by the NAVY during their presence.
Our first goal as we set out for the day was to check out the grocery store for a few things. We were looking for snacks, sunglasses for Shane (he forgot his) and sunscreen. We had made a couple quick stops the day before without much luck at local markets. Today, we found a much nicer, well stocked super market that actually had loose veggies (instead of having to buy two saran wrapped onto styrofoam - eww) and a nice selection of other things. The only snack we picked up were strawberries, but we got the sunscreen we were looking for. An employee suggested we try BlackBeard Sports for sunglasses, so we made our purchases and headed to downtown Isabel II.
