Magic Dragon Blog

We went into Carolina, a suburb of San Juan to go to Costco to stock up on stuff for the trip home. We were warned about the traffic, but figured on a Saturday afternoon, how bad could it be?

The answer is HORRIBLE! It was the day before Mother's Day, which is a huge holiday down here (Latin culture and all), so everybody was out shopping for Mama. Throw in huge rainstorms, flooding, and standing water on the roads everywhere, and it was a mess.

Navigating here is next to impossible. Maybe 10% of the streets have signs, so unless you're on a main road, there is no way to know where you are. We had instructions from the Costco website on how to find the store, but when we finally found the street we were supposed to turn on, it looked like it dead ended into a car wash, so we passed it by. We did a big loop through a residential/commercial/industrial neighborhood and decided to take one more shot at finding it by going up an exit ramp onto another highway so that we could see over the building on the road we WERE on. As soon as we got to the top of the ramp, we saw it right where it was supposed to be. The road we thought dead ended into the care wash, actually continued on into the Costco parking lot.

Of course, as soon as we parked the car, it started raining hard. Why didn't we bring an umbrella again? The lot was packed, the store was packed, and because of the rain, a line of people waiting for it to stop so they could leave, stretched back to the cash registers inside.

The store was very nece, bigger than the one we go to in Richmond, VA, and we managed to get everything we needed (and then some) and out in about an hour. They even had the Ron del Barrilito rum Frank wanted for pretty cheap; so we bought a case.

Shopping done, we hit the road home. Traffic was still bad, but at least we knew where we were going this time. The flooding around Rio Grande had gotten worse, but the rain was slowing down some. It still took us 1.5 hours to get back to Fajardo. It never even rained at the marina. After unpacking, repacking, and storing the groceries, we went back up to Luquillo to have dinner at another of the Kioscas. After looking around, we decided on a place called Congas, and had and excellent meal at a very reasonable price.

We walked down to El Jefe for a night cap; they had a very generous pour of Ron del Barrilito for $4 and talked to the owner/bartender. He's a gringo who moved down here for a job developing golf courses and grew to hate the job, so he opened the burger shack. We enjoyed chatting with hi, he is a super nice guy. We noticed a sing on the wall promoting BBQ ribs on Sundays, so we promised him we would be back for the ribs tomorrow after hiking in the El Yunque rain forest. He said to get there early before they ran out, but that if we got there before 8pm, we should be ok.