Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I never used to get seasick on the ferry to Hyannis. I must have taken that boat ride
twenty times during my Nantucket years and never once I did I feel nauseated.
The same can't be said of the morning we took the ferry from Fajardo to Vieques. I'm
not sure if it was something I ate or simply a case of the jitters but I felt distinctly chartreuse
the whole seventy-five minute voyage. Of course the screaming children, frigid air condi-
tioning and hideously uncomfortable benches didn't help.
Armando wasn't there to meet us at the ferry terminal when we finally arrived in
Vieques. This was strangely unsettling. We were already in the grip of a minor meltdown
about the whole enterprise; the last thing we needed was for our agent to go AWOL.
But when I called his cell phone, trembling with indignation, Armando assured me that
he was on the way and five minutes later he arrived wreathed in smiles.
He continued to exude breezy cheerfulness as we rode along the narrow verdant lanes
to our house, and by the time we pulled into the driveway he had convinced us that we'd
made the best deal in real estate history, including the purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch
for a handful of trinkets.
Just as people you've met only once before have a tendency, when you encounter them
a second time, to look both better and worse than you remembered them, our new house
seemed superficially more run-down than we recalled, and structurally more sound. While
this was slightly disappointing, the other way around would have been a disaster. We were
lucky.
Even so, the upstairs had been stripped bare.
The appliances (except for the rusty stove, which they'd apparently decided wasn't
worth hauling away) were history. There was a dead mouse on the kitchen floor. With the
elaborate window treatments gone we noticed that the window casings were in bad shape
and several of the louvered glass panels were cracked.
Unluckily for us, the plastic chandeliers were still in place.
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