Life Transplanet

When we were at the Vintage Inn in Galeton for the Avocado party, we had a chance to talk with the owner of the guesthouse/bed and breakfast about her experiences running an inn. One of our goals when we finally make the leap to Rincon, Puerto Rico is to run a small guest house/rental business there on our property.

For Diane, the owner of Vintage Inn, she said that in the case of a bed and breakfast it takes the ability to be ok with having strangers living in your house and at times messing up your stuff. She said her husband couldn’t stand it, and that is one of the reasons he is no longer involved in the business with her. She said you have to like people, entertain them sometimes, and graciously deal with complaints as they occasionally crop up. She said overall you just have to be flexible and good with your resources (time and money). She also mentioned that it doesn’t hurt if you like to cook, throw parties and decorate. In her guest house she had a couple of different rooms that she decorated different ways such as a Japanese “Zen” room, a Tuscan-style room, and a French/Parisian room.

Outside Vintage Inn in Eaton/Galeton

I think we have what it takes to run a business like this because we not only have our single-family home rental business which has taught us a lot…but we also rent out our basement bedroom/apartment. We have had all sorts of people live with us in that basement bedroom over the course of about four years.

Basement Bedroom

First we had Kosei, our Japanese high school exchange student who lived with us for a year. Then we had Jasmin a college student from Germany for just a couple of months. Then we had Luke, a student and volunteer fireman from Sterling, Colorado. We’ve also had Mark, a Culver’s franchise-owner, and Matt, his replacement. We had Bob, a municipal lawyer for the City of Greeley and Winna, a former Wal-Mart employee. We had my aunt Laura and we had Lisa, a UNC meteorology student. And now we have Jennifer, a medical student on rotation to be a P.A.

The Wetbar area of our basement used as a kitchenette by our guests

It has been very interesting meeting all of these various people. Sometimes there have been minor issues, but for the most part it has been a great experience and we have enjoyed sharing our house with nearly all of them. Some are  more outgoing and others have kept to themselves. Some we will probably be friends with forever, and others we will probably never see again. It is just cool to know that we were, for a short amount of time, a part of their lives, and they, of ours.

So I really think we’d enjoy having people stay with us at our property in Rincon. Plus, we wouldn’t even need to have “themed” rooms as they would already be naturally themed in their own way. There would be the jungle treehouse, the cabana (or two), maybe a “surf shack” and the villa. Plus it would be so fun to decorate and get them ready for people to stay with us. It would combine my love of “home” (I am a Cancer sign after all) with my love of people and their stories and become a viable business to boot.

While we were cleaning things up (a constant struggle) I found the journal we kept while in Puerto Rico on our honeymoon over 6 years ago. We had decided then that our honeymoon would help us decide if Puerto Rico was right for us to move to. After the adventures and enchantment of the island, we were hooked. I thought it might be fun if I posted these journal entries from time to time on here, so you can see through our eyes the first time we were ever in Puerto Rico and the excitement and fear of the unknown we felt.

At Casa Grande Resort in Utuado, Puerto Rico

Day 2- August 8, 2005

We have arrived at Hotel Casa Grande Mountain Resort. It is in the middle of a forest filled with banana trees, coconut trees, stray dogs and cats and we have a gecko in the room as I write this..he’s climbing the wall. We have a pool out the door and the coqui frogs are chirping louder than crickets. The owner of this place was a New York lawyer who left it all and opened this “green” yoga and nature resort.

Britton and the gecko

We spent most of last night searching for a place to stay and once we got our rental car at about 11pm we drove around and around tons of cars and people. They drive so horribly here- going through red lights, cutting you off, tail-gating- I’m just glad Britton’s driving and not me.

We saw hookers and what looked like crackwhores and dealers when we took a wrong turn into the ghetto -I can see why Pam thought San Juan is dirty! Some places are really dirty!

Our little red rental car, me, and the hotel of our first night in San Juan

Finally we found the beach and a small hotel and decided to call it good eventhough it was $115 for a small room. It was good to sleep though after traveling since 7am MDT that morning.

Today we got up around 9:30am local time (7:30 in Colo) and began our adventure. Britton brought up some continental breakfast and we headed out off to Old San Juan.

The Cobblestone Streets of Old San Juan

We took a bus into OSJ and saw Fort of San Cristobal and San Felipe del Morro- the huge walled-in city and cemetery which was really cool.

The cemetery in Old San Juan is right next to the ocean!

Very ornate marblework!

The bus system works pretty well and only cost 25 cents, sometimes free if you get on the trolleys. We stopped at a restaurant and had lunch -American cheese costs extra! $1!!! Most things so far cost about the same as at home, but it is very different here- especially the humidity and the warm, sweaty air.

At El Morro in San Juan

A bum came up to me as Britton and I were waiting for the bus and made a leaf flower and wanted all our change. He didn’t think .65 cents was enough apparently…

Grassy area between the cemetery and the morro -the kite flying area

In Old San Juan

Garita de Viejo San Juan

This Thanksgiving was pretty low-key. We went to my grandma’s  new house here in Greeley.

Thanksgiving 2011 at Grandma’s house

Then we went over to Britton’s family’s house for another meal. So we were highly stuffed.

While we are happy to have a four-day weekend, in some ways we are ready to get back to the normal work week for a few reasons. 1) My car broke down when I was out doing inspections on Wednesday. We had to get it towed from Fort Lupton back to Greeley. Because of the holiday they won’t even look at it until Monday. That makes me a little anxious. And 2) Britton is on-call this whole weekend, so on Monday he’ll get to turn the pager over to someone else.

Other than that, we’ve been enjoying the time off and the opportunity to think about our lives and be thankful for all we have. We’ve accomplished so much this year! It’s amazing. We are so thankful. Since the holidays are about bringing family together, it also made me remember how much I miss my dad. Holidays are hard like that. Sometimes in a weird way, I am happy I still have such strong feelings about my dad inside me though. It makes me feel like he is still here, somehow.

We’ve taken a couple of walks and even walked down inside the Greeley ditch (since it is empty this time of year) to stay out of the crazy wind. It’s like finding a new world to explore down there. Old ditched (literally) rusted bicycles, tree branches and crawdads line the bottom. We avoided Black Friday like the Black Plague and stayed inside and made turkey sandwiches, tea and brownies. We played Wii Frisbee golf, bowling, and the airplane game on Wii Sports Resort.

This week we also got our medical student who moved into the basement bedroom, but she is with her family this holiday weekend, so we have the house to ourselves. We also got our vacation time approved and are planning on going back to Rincon toward the end of January! We are already making a list of all the things we want to do when we are there!

Anyhow, that’s what we’ve been up to lately -the highs and the lows. Happy Thanksgiving!

My aunt Laura invited us to an avocado tasting party put on by the Avocado Diva and Vintage Inn in Eaton/Galeton. We had so much fun! The bed and breakfast was a beautiful house and the hostess is a terrific cook. There were all sorts of different foods to try that had a little avocado in them. From chocolate/avocado fudge and avocado salad to delicious guacamole and avocado leaf tea!

A nice spread of avocado and other snacks!

The Avocado Diva brought all of these avocados straight from small-scale farms in California. We learned all about different types of avocados including such varieties as Zutano, Bacon, Pinkerton, and the most famous: Haas. The type we were most impressed by was the Mexicola! According to the Avocado Diva, Brenda, this is the original wild Mexican avocado. It looks sort of like a fig or a plum and the skin is edible! The skin has a sort of nutty flavor to it. This is also the variety that you can use the licorice smelling leaves in iced tea. What’s more, is unlike most of the hybridized varieties, this one you can grow true to form from the seed. So we are going to try and sprout some here and maybe in PR too!

The small black, smooth-skinned Mexicola Avocado in comparison with another variety

We bought a variety box of them and are looking forward to enjoying our gourmet avocados for the next couple of weeks! Yay! We did find two or three avocado trees on our property in Rincon, so this makes us all the more excited to eat off our land! We learned today that there are avocados that mature at different seasons. Some are summer varieties and some are winter while others are year-round producers. We would love to be able to eat these all year round!

Holding a small Mexicola next to our box of goodies

We have been having what we call “vacation weekends” for the last few weeks.  This is where we do things we’d normally just do on vacation.  Like going to movies and visiting coffee shops.  That’s what we do when we are in Rincon and  Puerto Rico anyway.

Cassie Using the Computer at the new coffee shop Blue Mug in Greeley

Last weekend we went out to see the Rum Diary in the theater.  It is  based on a Hunter Thompson creation and takes place in Puerto Rico in the early 60′s.   It stars Johnny Depp too so we figured it was worth checking out. Cassie had read the book a few years ago and even then they were planning on making a movie.  It turned out pretty good.

But of course we are biased since it is a PR story! A lot of the scenes we knew exactly where they were filmed! I thought it did a good job of showing both the poverty and wealth of the island through the eyes of an outsider who attempts to uncover some of the news stories on the island in between Depp’s character’s drunken romps. It even went a little into the history of the US military bombing ranges on Vieques and Culebra and rampant corruption.

Depp’s character gets to drive a sweet 53 Corvette.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to take my Corvette down to PR but it’s not as cool as this 53 and it would be pretty expensive to ship it.   That and the sea air would most likely destroy the frame!

In other sort of related news, the offer we put in on the other house didn’t go thru otherwise we would most likely be working on weekends and nights.  It’s nice to have some downtime although it’s going to get really boring over the next few winter months until we get down to our place in Rincon. We are thinking January or early February depending on my work on-call schedule. With all of these ‘vacation weekends’ we are really geared up to get down there and get some work done on our house and property. But we’ll probably still take a few breaks at the Banana Dang and see a movie or two at Caribe Cinema for good measure.