Hello America
the Beautiful, the land of the free and the brave! Nothing like going to a foreign country to
make you appreciate yours. It is
wonderful seeing the American flags flying everywhere and where we aren’t “the
visitors” – where people are supposed to speak English (Puerto Rico hasn’t
gotten the memo on that requirement yet).
We pulled into
the Yacht Club at Ponce at about 11:30 a.m. local time. We called the Yacht Club repeatedly on the
VHF, as did a couple of other boats that were entering Ponce (this is the best
place to check in with the local authorities all the guidebooks say) and no one
was answering. Apparently, they don’t
answer the radio during lunchtime. We
docked at the fuel dock and after lunch time, we were going to get some
fuel. I called the local customs and
immigration people and checked in by phone, but they also came to see us. Super nice people and we had a nice visit and
they easily checked us in.
After our
visit with the local officials, we were questioning why they didn’t stamp our
passports. Then we started thinking we
needed to go to Immigration and get our passports stamped (since it was Customs
and Border Control that came to see us).
First we anchored C-Time in the harbor right next to an industrial dock
with a huge ship being loaded – it reminded us of being back at the Cooper
River Marina in Charleston. So after
anchoring, it was time to go to town in search of Immigration (and a data card
for Carla). We found a place to dock
D-Time, we sort of had to climb around a fence to get to the road but we did
it. Then we were like, ok, wonder where
Immigration is. There was an “official”
looking man sitting in his official car so I walked up and asked, where is
Immigration? He started pointing and
speaking in Spanish. Spanish! Oh my.
Daniel walks up and listens to the Spanish and starts asking the man
questions and the man finally says, “get in”.
J He drove us to
Immigration, only 5 minutes away – by car.
We get to Immigration and almost immediately run into our Customs and
Border Patrol agents that were on the boat.
They’re like, “what’s wrong, is everything okay?” We told them we just wanted to get our
passports stamped and they said, “you’re U.S. citizens are you are already
here, you don’t need to get your passports stamped. If you want them stamped so you know where
you’ve been, we can stamp them for you, but you don’t have to get them
stamped.” We still don’t really
understand that requirement – we always get them stamped when we fly into/out
of the country – but oh well, no stamps.
Then it was
off to a local LARGE mall. It was
wonderful. I miss shopping,
sometimes. Malls, food courts,
escalators…local heaven. We found an
AT&T place and the lady sells me a pre-paid phone, text and 4 gb data. I’m happy because I can turn on the hotspot
when we are back on the boat and we have all of our electronic gadgets
working. We get back to the boat and
hotspot doesn’t work on pre-paid. I was
not a happy camper to say the least. So
I have internet on an iPhone 4s but nothing else. So I’m heading back to an AT&T store or
somewhere in the next few days to try to fix this. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me
know. I just want data access – I’m not
asking for much!
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