P.R. November 2005

Page 12 - Just A Few Closing Odds & Ends

The surfing area of Rincon, is not in the town of Rincon. You go to Rincon and you don’t get waves. The swell wraps around the tip of the nameless cape here, and dies just before it makes it to Rincon town proper.

Dome’s and Maria’s are surprisingly similar surfspots, complete with a kind of middle peak, part way down the point.

There’s a red trolley bus in Rincon, but it doesn’t make it up here, here being the “Puntas” area.

Rincon is a typical little PR town, and the roads are all under construction and chewed up with holes and all sorts of horrors for motor vehicles, all over the place. I love it!

There’s a little “town square” right in the middle, and people are walking around all over the place.

To get to the library, which is right across from the police station, you must drive past a place called “Condom City” complete with a picture of a condom and skyline on the sign overhead out front. Wonder what all is for sale in THAT place, besides the obvious?

The wind blows from the north a lot, and many many many times, Maria’s is the ONLY clean wave around. “Up” from Maria’s the wind is on it, and “Down” from Maria’s the swell promptly dies, failing to wrap hard enough around the coastline.

It’s a shame the fucking island of Hispaniola, and beyond that, Cuba, is sitting where it is, ‘cause this place is made to order for the kinds of west swells that Hawaii gets. Too bad.

A LOT of the homes around here are solid concrete construction, complete with concrete slab roofs. This is hurricane country, as much so as Florida, and the people here seem to have taken that small matter into account when they constructed their domiciles. Kinda makes you wonder what’s up with Florida, with all those flimsy wooden roofs, and poorly constructed houses and stuff.

I just LOVE how the roads around here bob and weave through the countryside. And on top of that, they’re all NARROW. Don’t buy yourself a big fat SUV down here unless you want to spend a lot of time worrying about scraped doors and fenders. And if the roads aren’t narrow enough for you, then the locals will cheerfully park their cars on the sides of them, half on and half off, just to make SURE they’re narrow. I love it.

Puerto Rican’s just might be the nicest people in the world.

Lotta funny old consumer product brands in the stores here that I haven’t seen in literal DECADES back home. I’d completely forgotten that there was a “Vel” dishwashing soap when I was a kid, complete with endless ads on the tv and everything. It’s still here. So’s Holsum bread. Is there still an Esso gas back in Estados Unidos? It’s alive and well down here, that’s for sure. And Gulf gas too. Hell, I learned to surf across from a Gulf Gas Station when I was a kid growing up in South Patrick Shores. And there was a big Gulf Station on the corner of 520 and A1A in Cocoa Beach for years back then, too.

All of the foregoing stories, and this last little bit too, were written either the day the events described happened, or just a day or two afterwords. Expect this stuff to age, ok? Time flows on, but these written words do not update themselves to keep pace with it.