Roosey Road, PR
18.14.009N
65.37.581W

Prior to renting a car today, we hitched a ride with some of our boat neighbors to the bowling alley and finally were able to upload our posts. I also tried to get caught up on paying some of our bills electronically and promptly locked myself out of one of my accounts. Without a telephone, I couldn't call the bank to ask them to reset my password and going back to the boat to use the sat phone, I'm couldn't access the internet to find out what I was doing wrong. A modern catch-22.

Since, we had to rent a car to take DocNoMore and MTNest to the airport tomorrow, we took advantage of the situation. First we checked in with them to make sure everything was still a go and suggested meeting for dinner to celebrate Valentine's Day, then took off to make sure we still knew how to get around this side of the island.

For those of you reading this that were stationed here at the same time we were, you wouldn't believe the changes. Back then, if you saw something you thought you might have a need for in the next 6 months, you were advised to pick it up, as you might not see it again when you did need it. If it couldn't be found on base, I had to travel to the nearest mall in Carolina, about an hour away. I was in hog heaven when they built a WalMart a few miles outside of the gates of the base. Today, there are strip malls leading up to WalMart and all the way to Plaza Carolina. Every store, restaurant, and service is represented and now the mall in Carolina is about an hour and a half away.

The first thing we did was get a telephone so that we could make calls at a reasonable rate. Then we tried to find the Mexican restaurant we'd been telling our friends about to make reservations for dinner. We thought it was called Lolita's but when we found Lolita's, we recognized it as once being a little hole in the wall that served great food. It has since tripled in size and is a fashionable restaurant now. The one we had been looking for was Mona's. The hill top where it was located has been leveled off and now there are hundreds of condos overlooking the ocean. We were able to locate the West Marine, a Home Depot, a WalMart, and the sail loft but we'll have to wait until another time to visit those stores.

We had been invited to cocktails and hors d'oeuvres for this evening on St. Christopher, one of the boats here at Roosey to meet all of the other 'live aboards'. So we rushed back to join them for an hour or so before we returned to pick up the crews from DocNoMore and MTNest for a Valentine's dinner at Lolita's. We met two other couples, Chris & Jeff on Dawn Trader and Shirley & Jack on DeDeMau, both of whom have been cruising for some time and are now on their way back to the States.

There's something about having a car these days that means packing as much as you possibly can in the 24 hours that you have it. Tomorrow we'll pick up DocNoMore and MTNest at 6:30am to take them to the airport. Then we'll head over to Ft. Buchanan to run through the PX before we have to take the car back. Dale promised to check into some of the weekend specials that car rentals have, so that we can finish off some of our projects.