“TGI Thursday”
August 8th, 2002 ~ Day 7
True to form, we slept late, missing the sunrise entirely. Caring not one whit about our absence, the sun did in fact rise in usual fashion.
We wanted to get the most out of our little rental car, but we also wanted to snorkel later, so Kristina went down to the beach to get snorkeling gear. Then we got more properly dressed (read: We put shoes on) and hopped in the Tracker. As storm clouds grew on the horizon, we headed to town for lunch. We had seen a TGI Friday’s and decided it would be a good place to refresh our American taste buds.
We waited for our all-but-totally-American lunch to arrive. Then we waited some more.
Then, having nothing else particularly important to do at the time, we kept on waiting.
Our waiter, seemingly realizing that Kristina and I were doing enough waiting for all of us, decided to take a break from waiting and was nowhere to be found for quite awhile.
When he did finally return, we were really running short on time and practically had to inhale our food. But since that’s what we usually do with our food anyway, it wasn’t too big a deal, except for the fact that Kristina was dead-set on consuming every last drop of the precious Bud Light, allowing none to go to waste. This was a hurdle that was quickly overcome by Kristina pouring the remainder of her beer into a styrofoam to-go cup, and we were on our way.
It had already begun raining a little when we reached the Tracker, so the seats were all wet and spongy as we drove toward the main road that led back to the hotel. We careened around corners and weaved through traffic, dodging pedestrians and scooters alike, escaping the city of San Miguel one last time as the downpour intensified. By the time we made it to the city limits, it was really raining. Not the normal rain that we were used to, where you kind of think you may have felt a raindrop or two land on your arm, but real tropical rain forest rain. Monsoon rain. The word “deluge” comes to mind. Our clothes became soaked and the cup holders in the Tracker filled with water. The windshield wipers quickly became more detrimental than useful, as it was easier to see through the now solid sheet of water covering the windshield than to try to pick out the road through the blur of swishing wipers. As if that weren’t enough, my glasses quickly became covered with little droplets of water, making them useless as well, so I ditched them. Kristina was mostly concerned with keeping the rain out of her open beer cup, which she kept covered with her free hand and sheltered as much as possible by the slightly angled windshield.
By this point, I was in a situation that I had never been in before: I was driving along a highway in a roofless rental car with no windshield wipers in the midst of a torrential downpour, in a foreign country under traffic laws I had no knowledge of and traffic signs that I couldn’t understand …without glasses.
We had a blast.
We eventually made it back to our hotel to turn in the rental car, at which time the rain stopped.
We went to our room to change clothes and grab the snorkeling stuff, then we went to the beach to swim with the fish. The experience was just as good as the previous day’s, and left us longing for more by the time we had to return the snorkeling equipment.
We returned to our room, showered, and crashed on the bed for a good late afternoon nap, followed by dinner at La Casona, which I had begun affectionately referring to as La Crapola. I’ve forgotten what we ate, but I do know that the bees got more out of it than we did. However, seemingly un-satiated by sampling our dinner, one bee in particular decided to take a stab at me. As I was walking along the side of the pool, I felt a sharp pain in the sole of my foot, and quickly stomped down hard to squash the source of the pain, which of course turned out to be a bee. It wasn’t too bad though, and I was able to remove the stinger quickly enough to avoid any lasting effects from the sting. I took it in stride and triumphantly strolled from the site of the bee battle, looking forward to relating the scene later with a lot of alliteration.
By the time we got back to our room, we were tired and decided to call it a night. We queued up The Godfather and settled down for the evening.