25 January 2023

Playa El Combate

I had the day to myself. Decided to explore the island. Got myself a rental car and drove to the furthest end of the island. This is the Southwest end of the island – about two and a half hours drive away.

El Combate beach was to die for. The water stayed true to the Caribbean colors and it had a lot of green trees giving shade right up on the sand – which was as white as it could be.

24 January 2023

Breakfast companion

At any seaside restaurant, when we sit down for breakfast, we are often visited by birds of the sparrow family, sometimes crows and sometimes even beach birds.

This is the first time a rather stern looking rooster and a hen walked up.

I canceled my egg omelette order to avoid infuriating them 🙂

24 January 2023

The destruction that storms wrought

The upper picture is a view from our room when we came to this same hotel eight years back. You can see the structure jutting out into the water with pavement on top. We would go to the edge and watch the high waves.

Then Hurricane Irma came in 2017. Caused over a billion dollars of damage to the island.

The bottom picture is what remains of that structure as I can see from my room today.

19 January 2023

Curious minds want to know

If you come out of O’hare airport or approach the same, you are likely to notice a lot of signs helping you to the Kiss ‘N Fly parking lot. Seeing such a sign from the train that I boarded from the rental car center to the terminals, two questions immediately popped to my mind.

1. First, is this where you kiss the wrong spouse and subsequent events inspire you to fly? (or for that matter, why insist on the kissing part?)

2. Why Kiss and then Fly? This is where you wait for incoming passengers – to pick them up. When you drop them you take them straight to the departure area at the terminal. Should it not be “Fly and Kiss” or perhaps “Kiss and Drive” away? The chronological flow betrays the knowledge of grammatical sequencers.

What did you say? I need some serious help? 🙂