Greetings from Puerto Rico

Ok, ok, there was going to be no posting while on vacation. In fact, the only reason we even brought the laptop with us is its capacity for playing DVDs -- something that is essential in a resort that, blessedly, completely lacks nightlife. One lesson learned thus far is that, while the giant screen is fantastic for watching movies, it makes the laptop rather large, and kinda heavy for schlepping through airports.

But you're probably not all that curious about the weight of my laptop. You're probably wondering if I can see the Caribbean from my room, or if I have to walk 10 steps to get a glimpse. (The latter.) You're probably curious about how the reading material is holding up. (Finished the Wallace Stegner, which was excellent, yesterday, and am two-thirds of the way through the Saskiad. Also finished the New Yorker and a Rolling Stone. Looks as though the stash will hold out for the rest of the trip, though.) And you might be wanting to know how the relaxation is going.

And that, my friends, I can not put in parentheses. It deserves its own paragraph, a paragraph about the amazement we felt when rounding the corner from the parking lot Thursday night, after we'd parked our extremely elegant Mitsubishi Lancer and dragged our tired, travel-weary bodies to the front desk -- an open-air affair from which we could see one of the two pools, a fancy restaurant where casually dressed people were eating dinner outdoors, several palm trees, a sandy beach and the warm, blue Caribbean. Yes, we like it here. We haven't even looked at the car since we arrived Thursday night. We spent Friday on the beach, with time out for meals, a walk down the beach, a swim in the ocean and a nice nap. We had sunscreened well, though I had a little mishap involving fresh sunscreen rubbed off by my thongs... an error I didn't notice until last night, when I realized that I have a very odd little sunburn pattern across the top of both feet. Even that is rather minor.

This morning we slept late but still managed to snag prime beach chairs under a grass hut for flexibility in our sunbathing options. We were on the beach from 10 until 1:30 or so (all times are approximate -- the watch hasn't left the room), when a little rain shower made us decide it was time for lunch. Since then, it's rained all afternoon. We finished watching Metropolitan on the laptop, then bought a deck of cards and tried to remember how to play gin rummy while we sat at the open-air bar, gazing out at the gray sky, the brightly colored houses across the cove, and the blue sea. It's still raining, I think, which may put a damper on our 7:30 outdoor dinner reservation -- and which has given me dispensation to use the hotel's wifi connection, something I had avoided until now -- but we will live. We are extremely mellow, and very, very happy.

We have plans to take out a couple of the resort's kayaks, to take a ride on the rickety looking ferry to the island across the way, to venture into the dry forest a few miles down this curving coastal road. Whether we will do all that between Sunday and Monday, I don't know... and, really, I don't care. It's enough just to be here, in the warm air and the warm water, to be silent for hours as we both read, to send each other into hysterics at dumb jokes over lunch, to hold hands as we watch the sunset.

Further updates will not be forthcoming if it is sunny, so a lack of things to read for you indicates good fortune for me. We'll see what happens.