Vieques, Puerto Rico

I left last Thursday for Vieques, Puerto Rico, and today's the day for the return trip. Here's what the trip home looks like:

Catch a plane to San Juan. Wait for three hours in San Juan. Fly for five hours to Houston. Wait there for an hour. Fly for 5 hours to Sea-Tac. Wait for baggage, get home at 1:00 am (5:00 am body time).

That said, this crazy trip was totally worth it. I splashed around in a bioluminescent bay; visited deserted Navy storage bunkers, the last Spanish fort built in the Caribbean, bizarre rock outcroppings, and the ruins of a sugar plantation; shared the road with wild horses, snorkeled the reefs, and lounged on no less than 8 pristine beaches (including one black sand beach)--all protected from development because they are inside the boundaries of the wildlife preserve. Most of the beaches required a bumpy trip over a dirt road through the preserve. It is an incredible thing to see beaches like this surrounded by lush green rather than hotels.

If you click on the photos below they should get a lot bigger.

Sorry, no pictures off the bay. It was pitch black and while the luminescence was crazy bright, my point-and-shoot camera wouldn't have captured it. But to give you an idea of what the bay was like, the single-cell organisms that light it up numbered 500,000 to the gallon. And every time you move them they light up. They caught in my beard and made it glow (briefly) and when you swim it looks like you've got angelic wings. It's an incredible thing.