2022 Spanish Virgin Islands Prologue: San Jose to San Juan Puerto Rico

 We rose at 5:00am, caught a ride to the San Jose Airport, and sailed through the TSA Pre check line. The flight from San Jose to Atlanta was fine, but the flight from Atlanta to San Juan was delayed for some unstated reason. We took the taxi to our rental condo, only to discover that the place was nothing as described --- the sofa bed wouldn't even fold flat. Xiaoqin immediately booked the resort hotel next door, and but it was too late in the morning to do much, so we just slept as it was.'

In the morning, I walked down to the 24 hour supermarket to buy instant noodles, which we had for breakfast. We set out to walk to the beach around 10:00am, but the most direct route walked us through the hotel! We walked to the hotel and asked for a checkin, expected to be told no, but instead, they checked us in right away and gave us our resort bands. The kids went to the beach and I walked several trips and moved the luggage from the inadequate condominium to the fancy resort hotel room.

After that, I had time to relax and do an open water swim near the beach. The water was too churned out so there was not much to see, but it still was more appealing than the huge hotel swimming pool. We ate a late lunch at the local Mexican place, relaxed at the hotel for an hour, and then walked over to the dinner location that Niniane had picked, where Arturo, Dan, and Niniane and us had dinner.

We planned for the next day's rendezvous. Niniane and Dan had valiantly bought all the provisions, and was still optimistic that she could fit Arturo, Mark, and their luggage into their car, but I had to plan to have an Uber XL, since I had a huge suitcase (which Arturo had kindly brought over to California for us using his copious luggage allowance). I asked the hotel taxi service how much to bring us to the marina, but they wanted much more than the Uber prices!

We tried to go to bed early after dinner, but the hotel had a wedding that night, complete with loud music and beach drums going thump thump thump all night making it hard to sleep. To add insult to injury, there was a problem with the hotel fire alarm system, which made it go off twice in the night. The hotel might have been more expensive but it was by no means any better for sleeping!