navelgazing.omphaloskeptic.net Journal

Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

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Driving and Diving Fajardo, PR, Wednesday, 07 January 2015 9:52pm

We spent a lot of time in the car today. We drove about 2/3 of the way around the island.

We got up before dawn to drive out to Rincón to do a couple scuba dives. Unfortunately, the weather was too rough for us to go out to Isla Desecho, which is supposed to be the best diving in the area, so we did a couple local dives. They were decent dives. We saw a couple spiny lobsters, a nurse shark, and several smallish spotted morays and spotted drums. We also saw a common-ish fish, the Porkfish that we hadn't happened to see in Turks and Caicos. The visibility wasn't very good, and the dives were quite shallow, partly because the boat was also carrying snorkelers, and partly because some of the divers were diving with no computers. I bet there's much better diving around, but this was what we could get on short notice.

After diving, we hopped back into the car for a trip out to the Arecibo radio telescope. It has one of the best space science museums I've seen. Good demonstrations that cover some important questions. On the way we read up on the observatory and found out that there's been a surprising amount of important work done there. It's also quite impressive to look at.

Then it was back into the car, and a drive all the way across the north side of the island. We got bogged down in San Juan traffic along the way, but it was otherwise uneventful. We bought a lot of crappy food at a gas station along the way and were surprised at what was good (the squishy pink cookie-thing) and what was terrible (the pork rinds). Happily, we had a really good dinner to make up for it.

It was raining lightly when we arrived in Fajardo, which has brought out a host of frogs. Adrienne helped me fine the island's signature frog, the coquí, in the potted tree right outside of our door.