Hurricanes and Haciendas in Puerto Rico

We have never felt so blessed in our entire lives. In the last few days, we have been inundated by people inquiring about the hurricane and how it may have impacted us. While Lorri has tried to keep everyone updated on FB, we wanted to open this post with how we experienced the hurricane. These first two photos are literally how the hurricane looked from our vantage point in Western Puerto Rico. 

Thankfully, the only thing our beloved part of the island had to show for the storm was some larger than normal waves for this time of year, and some unusually stunning sunsets in a place where stunning sunsets occur every single night of the year. 

Truth is, we rode out the vast majority of the storm at our favorite Aguada haunt, The Ocean BLVD Bar and Grill, where awesome food, great service, and friendly locals at a family owned business make every moment of surf watching even better than, well, surf watching. 

We have made some great friends at the Ocean, and one of them will eventually be a feature in a future blog, as we work to help one kick ass young woman achieve her dream of being her own boss at a tourism business. 

As the storm drew near, however, everything shut down in preparation, and unable to accomplish anything on the house hunting front, we drove around NW Puerto Rico taking in some of the awesome street art that just seems to happen everywhere...

We aren't sure who would allow their entire neighborhood to be painted like this, but we would like to have a drink or ten with every single one of them!

What the hurricane did cause was our return flight via Orlando to be delayed into infinity. Thanks to reports from others trying to get into Florida (Thank you, Tena!) we managed to avoid being part of the calamitous disasters caused by airlines of people being stranded in airports indefinitely. 

Frequent traveler secret: airlines will almost NEVER cancel a flight because it costs them money in refunds, and will instead happily allow people to just show up for flights that aren't ever going to happen and sit for hours and even days while they delay and delay and delay, knowing full good and well it isn't ever going to happen. 

The result of it all was we became stranded on a desert isle for another week, and a return flight via New Jersey. So, the house hunt continued...

Puerto Rican pride is on full display everywhere you go. It is a different sort of "nationalism" felt by a proud people who only love and adore their island. For every Puerto Rican flag, we see multiple aging Puerto Rican males wearing their US Military Veteran hats beneath them, as this too, is America, and these people too, are just as proud of Americans as you can find anywhere stateside.

Like any good Americans, they embrace their rights to freedom of assembly as witnessed recently when they retired a corrupt governor. Signs of their peaceful political uprising remain all over the island.

Some are more direct than others. We are actually sad to have missed the demonstrations and seeing the energy of so many standing up for justice and waving those bright beautiful flags into the air together. Truly, nothing could be more American than that, and it took a relatively tiny island to remind the rest of America what democracy actually looks like in action. It is not about being right or left, but about justice and injustice, right and wrong, and everyone can appreciate that, I think.

Lorri looking for a house (or not so much) in one of the awesome plazas in a town center. Like our town squares in Iowa, Puerto Rican towns all have open plazas where people gather for all sorts of festivities, special occasions, political debates, music concerts, and sometimes just for old men to sit beneath shade trees and play dominoes. I'm pretty sure that if we were being paid to house hunt and had a boss, we would have been fired on, like, the second day here.

Lorri gets up close and personal with the local fauna. Buzz, being fearless of all groups of weapon wielding men, but equally as fearful of small crawling things and the flying, man eating piranhas known as bats, warned her not to touch it, but she never listens to his wisdom regarding living creatures and their probable inherent dangers. More than likely, her hand will fall off later this week.

Wait, what were we supposed to be doing here? Oh yeah... house hunting! We remember now! That is pretty much how we did it, too. Waking up early and going for coffee (strangely, it is difficult to find coffee early in the morning, and even the local donut shop in Aguada we frequent doesn't open until 10am), then off to the beach for a walk to discover the treasures the surf delivered overnight, then back to the room to gawk at home listings and rentals until we lost interest and popped open a beer.

We must have looked at a hundred homes online, and several dozen on drives that are Se Vende (for sale). We even managed to get hold of a couple of realtors to see a few in person (not an easy trick in a place where even businesses operate on "island time" and have a tendency to get back to you... when they get back to you... and sometimes never at all). 

We continued to look for affordable real estate to purchase in our beloved Rincon-Aguada corridor, but Rincon is way out of our price league, and Aguada has a lot of properties within walking distance of the beach that have very murky pasts, and even murkier, less certain futures. The general feeling of the longtime locals is not to buy in seaside Aguada at any price because if the water does not get you, some other unseen forces, like eventual government flood zone intervention, probably will.

Puerto Rico house hunting lesson #485: TALK to the locals and the neighbors. DO NOT trust a realtor about a house, or an inspector, or an anyone. Ask the neighbors. The people of this part of the island especially, are incredibly welcoming and friendly and will do virtually anything to help even a stranger. 

In fact, they will even fight one another for the privilege of helping you and argue how their advice is the best. No. Really. It is totally true. If you get out of your car in Rincon or Aguada and look generally confused or lost or in need of help, someone will eventually come and talk to you, and that will in turn draw a small crowd as everyone wants to know what's going on. Then, when they find out you are wanting some sort of information or assistance, they will each seek to offer you the best advice or assistance and argue as to why their's is better than the other person's advice or assistance. 

So, if you ever find yourself in a strange neighborhood in Puerto Rico, and the dogs and chickens are milling about and everyone seems to be staring at you... know that they are most likely staring because they are wondering if you need anything they might be able to offer you. Reason #987 that we LOVE this island. 

What? Oh yeah... we were house hunting. That's right. We remember now. So, in the midst of all of the phone calls and texts and real estate agents, Lorri thought it might help to write a post on a Rincon FB group. Pffft, said Buzz, FB group?! Whoever heard of finding anything on a FB group...especially in a crazy market like Rincon, where the surfing and 1960s California vibe, has drawn artists, tourists, and snowbirds in like a hurricane surf, and the prices are out of this world, and, generally speaking, out of our budget as well. FB Group. Whatev's Lorri. You go girl. Do your cute, pointless thing while Buzz does all of the heavy lifting of actually texting unresponsive real estate agents for homes we don't really want to look at anyhow. 

Fast forward like, five minutes...

Lorri: Someone messaged me about a house in Rincon.

Buzz: What? I'm busy here, honey. I have a line on a hundred year old home made of rotting concrete perched precariously upon a cliff twenty miles up a narrow four foot wide mountain road where the locals drive eighty-five miles per hour.

Lorri: He says he wants us to go look at his home in Rincon as he is being detailed out of the country for his final tour of duty abroad in the military. 

Buzz: We have already looked. We can't afford to buy or rent a home in Rincon. Our budget would only allow us to rent a box large enough for one of us and our dog. The other person and the cat will have to sleep outside. Remember?

Lorri: I think we should still go look at it. He seems really nice.

Buzz: Ugggh. Fine. I will set aside my important work of negotiating on the awesome 'cash only' deal I may have just scored on this oceanfront bungalow made entirely of drift wood and paper mache to humor you.

We drove to the house just outside of Rincon when the owner was absent, picking up his son from the airport, as he is in college in Florida and was fleeing the hurricane. The owner, as it turns out, is also a recent fellow empty nester.

What we discovered turned out to be the most beautiful oasis we have seen in all of our drives, nestled in the hills on an estate just outside of Rincon. This picture does not do it justice. He had asked us only to drive out, look at it, and offer what we thought it was worth to rent while he was away.

Being extremely familiar with the market in the area, we knew immediately that "what it is worth" is far more than what we could pay. But in a week full of crushing disappointments, it would be a relatively easy one to have someone tell us we could not afford such a beautiful home. 

After messaging with the owner more, we drove out today to meet with him. His name is Ben. His place is stunning. We are in nearly the same place in life, with nearly the same humor and outlook, and almost the same dreams and desires for the future. He scoffed at our offer and said it was too much to pay. He wanted less money and more to know that his home would be lived in and cared for by people who would watch over it, and most of all, enjoy it while he was away. 

Ben avoiding the camera.

The garage where Lorri's art magic will soon be happening. Ben refuses to allow her to hang her creations inside the house until he can see some of her work. Buzz agreed this was probably a wise decision as she intends to work with wood mostly and has to date only produced popsicle stick art back in grade school for want of the proper tools and a workspace. Good news is... Rincon is at the literal cutting edge of wood art, and there are any number of artisans working in wood that any museum back in the states would be proud to display, and she is a very quick study.

Ben pointing at something in the kitchen.

Ben pointing at something else. He likes to point at stuff. We mostly look in the direction he points and nod our heads in agreement. We aren't even sure what he is saying most times. The house is just too stunning.

What occured at the house was something less of a potential business transaction, and more of a bonding ceremony of kindred spirits. We sat on Ben's front porch for over an hour after we toured the property and sampled fruits from the trees and made friends with the dogs and neighboring cows. We had a ton of great laughs too. 

But our tour did not stop with the house. We drove together to see the homes of the other people in the area Ben knew (practically everyone), and then on to his father's house to meet his family. And by day's end we do not only have a place to lay our heads for the foreseeable future, but an entire new circle of people we feel so at home with, we can call them our friends already. 

This is Puerto Rico. These are the people of this part of Puerto Rico. If you get out of your car in almost any neighborhood and look lost or in need, people will fight to help you. And, as it turns out, they also do the same for those lost souls who make posts on FB. 

In our part of rural Iowa, we never drive by someone who is broke down or walking without stopping to help, and we never ask anything in return. Remove the beaches, the bars, the mountains, and the palm trees, and it is truly amazing, at how much this place, and these people, so far removed by geography, can feel so much to us... like home. 

Editors Note: Ben is not so camera shy as all that, but we did not ask his full permission to make him a celebrity in rural Iowa amongst our readers, so we edited him to seem a lot more mysterious than he actually was. Honestly, if you met Ben with us drinking at a bbq back home, you would never know that we three had just met, and you would sort of get the feeling that we had been sitting under the same shade tree together flipping each other shit for years. 

Thanks for reading, everyone!