In the summer of 1992, we wanted to take our 3 daughters on a plane to somewhere tropical.  I had built up an excess of FF points while traveling with AGCO.  We wanted to fly somewhere in the Caribbean, but soon found out that we didn't have enough miles, except to fly to Puerto Rico (it was only 25,000 miles) so that’s where we went, along with Kendra's friend , Diana Gunter.    Not having online capabilities, you had to book your hotels by phone on the basis of what you saw in a travel magazine.    The hotel we picked in San Juan looked pretty good from the pictures.  It was the restored Spanish Consular’s residence called the “La Condesa”.  We flew into San Juan, got a rental car (shown at right) and went to find our hotel.  When we did locate it, we found that the pictures in the magazine were from a few years back.  It was horrible.  The water in the pool was black.  Our rooms used to have a TV hung from the wall, but it looked like had been ripped out.  The towels in the bathroom were all assorted types and colors.  It took us  about two minutes to determine that we weren’t going to spend another moment here.  The manager on duty was very apologetic and said he would refund our deposit.  I asked him where there were some good hotels on the beach.  He said to go to Rincon on the West side of the island.  I got on a pay phone and using a calling card, started calling hotels from a list the manager had in an old magazine.  After about 20 minutes, we got us a reservation and off we went.  It was almost 100 miles away and it took us almost three hours as the roads were not all that good, the signs were in Spanish and we were not going very fast.  I don’t even remember the name of the hotel or what it looked like. It did have a nice beach and the kids had a good time and we made it home without incident.  I do remember playing golf on a military golf course with a 40 mph wind.  Trina was with me and we had to stop early because we ran out of balls.  They kept getting blown away.  We did subsequently return, in February of 2018 as the last stop of a Caribbean cruise with Silverseas.

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