Puerto Rico: Getting There

(Editor's note: this is part 1 of a 3 part series on our Puerto Rico trip, blogged thoughtfully in reverse chronological order so that you may read straight down for these three posts instead of bottom up. Or something).

We left for Puerto Rico at 7:30 last Monday morning. This was, of course, rush hour, and we were stuck in stop-and-go traffic for most of the 30-minute-turned-50-minute drive to the airport. As always when we travel with the kids, I was slightly on edge and worried about making it onto our 9:40 flight. We pulled into the long term lot, pulled into the first parking space we saw, and breathed a sigh of relief.

And then Ben threw up all over himself, his car seat, etc. Apparently the ride to the airport had not agreed with him. His vomiting went something like this: "[BARF] OOOH LOOK! An airplane! [BARF BARF]." There could be worse things, it turns out, than vomiting in the airport parking lot, because of course I had six changes of clothes for him within easy reach so we hurriedly stripped him, changed his clothes, and threw his dirty ones in the trunk of the car.

With that hurdle surpassed we pretty quickly made it to our gate in plenty of time. The flight was pretty uneventful except for one notable exception, which is that I noticed that Ben had a lot of white flecks in his hair, and this combined with the notice about a case of head lice in his classroom that came home in his backpack a week ago had me totally panicking and convinced he had lice. I couldn't carefully inspect his hair because he was in a foul mood at that time and wouldn't let me touch him, so I quietly (or not so quietly) panicked for about an hour before he allowed me to pick at his hair a bit and I realized that whatever it was it wasn't lice eggs because lice eggs won't come out, and after combing his hair a bit I was able to get all of the white stuff out. To say that I was extremely relieved would have been a gross understatement.

Rebecca, heretofore unmentioned, was very good on her first airplane ride*, probably because she was afraid. She quietly panicked in my lap at every sign that the airplane was actually moving, flattening herself against my chest and burying her head in my arm pit. During one of these sessions she fell asleep, and slept for over an hour.

After the 3 1/2 hour flight to San Juan we picked up our rental car, stopped at Crisi's mom's house to pick up the rest of our traveling companions (10 of us in all including kids) and set out for the beach house in Rincon, about two hours drive from San Juan. We stopped for an early dinner (late lunch for those of us who'd been traveling all day) and the drive was ALMOST uneventful until, about 15 minutes away from the beach house we heard a BANG! and realized that the windshield of our rental car had been hit by something falling from a tree (which we later identified as an unripe mango). The windshield of the rental car, unfortunately, was cracked quite nicely.

That about sums up the Getting There section of my three part Puerto Rico series... next up, Being There.

*She made up for it in spades on the ride home.