….Puerto Rico and St. Croix.

Okay. This will be easy since we have just returned from a week in Rincon, on the west coast of the “enchanted island”.  A surfer’s paradise.

Both places are green and lush and have nice beaches, warm weather year-round and warm sea water. Both places have lots of people who speak Spanish and English quite well. Both places have nice, friendly people working in the tourism industry. Both places have tons of mangos falling from trees and rotting all over the place during this time of year. Business is slow this time of year for restaurants and bars frequented by tourists.

Here’s where our experience of each place differs. There are many more roads in Puerto Rico. They are much better maintained  than our, at least in the communities we drove in. Maybe they are able to maintain their roads better because they roads are so small. Many of the “two-way” streets we drove on were barely wide enough for one compact rental car. And with people parking on the sides of many of these roads, they were practically impassable.

Other differences: Our restaurants are sooooo much better. Better food, better atmosphere, better presentation, better wines…..The servers were all very nice and helpful, but the food was not even in the same ballpark.

Our first night there, we went to a local place which came highly recommended by the people at our guest house. It was kind of a shabby looking place, but the owner is a fisherman and they always have fresh local seafood. We ordered two different local wines by the glass to go with our tuna and mahi entrees. Ugh! The wines were sweet red wines! We were forced to order a bottle of Castillo del Diablo, a familiar red to get us through the meal. The bottle was only around $20. The entrees were $8.00 each and came with choice of heavy starchy fried or boiled side dish (yucca, green or ripe plantain, yam, tostones…..). The fish was gristly,  the cuts small, and served on styrofoam plates.. We ate most of it, though and tried a local “corn” ice cream (served in styro with plastic spoons) for dessert. It was interesting. Not very creamy, though, and we drank our sweet local wines with that.

Whew! Since we had cooking facilities in our room, we bought a few items for snacks and breakfast for a few days. I usually boil some eggs which we have with english muffins or bagels and cream cheese instead of having to go out every morning. There’s not much in the way of breakfast restaurants in the area either. There was one that looked interesting, so Sunday morning we went looking for it. They advertise 100 different garnishes and hot sauces for their bloody marys. That was a big selling point for me. But by the time we got there, breakfast was over. I had a bloody anyway (there were 4 hot sauces, and the garnishes were a lime and a celery stick), and it was okay. Michael tried a rum drink. Drinks were served in plastic  cups. The food was just okay here, too. I had a taco salad or something and Michael had fish tacos. Not memorable, but not bad.

Pizza signs abound on Puerto Rico. We wanted to rename it Pizza Rico. We never got pizza out, but the subliminal thing must have worked because we bought a frozen pizza from a health food store to have one night in our room. We ended up having it for breakfast one morning.

I really wanted to have a nice veggie omelet with home fries and toast for breakfast one morning with a bloody mary or two, but the rest of the times we went out in search of recommended places, they were closed or not at all up to par. One place was a bakery. Highly recommended. I really didn’t want to try it, but Michael insisted. Well, it was gross. Slimy kid snot on all the tables, flat omelets and frozen, fast-food-type hash browns.I didn’t want coffee, and could not get a bloody, so I ordered a beer. They looked at me like I had five heads. Whatever.

Our last morning we drove way out to a place at the top of a windy ridiculously narrow road for what promised to be an awesome breakfast. They were closed for the month. There is a “slow season” in Rincon, between the winter tourist season and the summer Puerto Rican season, when PR families with kids travel out to the resort areas. Ha ha ha. So we went to a hotel/condo restaurant right on the beach. It was 10:29. They stopped serving breakfast at 10:30. Hahahahahaha.

We had found a place with a breakfast buffet a few days earlier. Michael called ahead to make sure they were still serving, and they were – for fifteen more minutes. We told them we’d be there in ten minutes, and they did make us a nice veggie omelet, but I couldn’t get a bloody because the bar wasn’t open yet. Oh well. I eventually got one and Michael had one of their Pirata Cofresi special rum drinks served in a coconut.

For our last evening there, we decided, after some deliberation, to go to a nice-looking place just up the hill from our guest house and a few doors up from the place with the corn ice cream. They had decent wines and a nice looking menu. We sat outside. The only other occupied table was inside. It was a dark and stormy night……and we felt like eating lobster. They had a few different preparations like thermidore, scampi, stewed, in butter sauce, with onions, etc. We started with a bowl of delightful French onion soup, and had a lobster thermidore and a lobster scampi. with the requisite choice of bland starches. We were surprised when they brought each of us a small “salad” (ice burg shreds with a hard pink tomato slice – and french dressing). We thought, “okay the place is much more expensive than the others we’d been to, so the lobster should be good”. Well, it was just okay. The thermidore consisted of a few chunks of lobster in a half shell, swimming with frozen vegetables in a cheez wiz  sauce. The scampi was better, but they used garlic powder and not fresh garlic.

A couple of nights before this, we were on our way back from a disastrous “day trip” and came upon a seaside restaurant where we were greeted very warmly by the host and waitress, served a nice wine, and a fabulous meal. The place looked over a surfer’s beach in the town called Isabela. The entertainment was great. As the surfers caught small but rewasonable waves, we watched grackles in a coconut palm performing their mating rituals.

We started with a cup of cream of plantain soup. It was good, and the seafood ceviche was nice as well. We shared the “best mofongo in Puerto Rico”and loved it, although we hadn’t tried all the other mofongo, so we couldn’t really vouch for their claim. This was our best meal of the whole trip, so I didn’t want it to end. We even had cheese flan  and nice Puerto Rican coffee for dessert. Yum!

So, in the restaurant department, St. Croix is definitely superior.

Because of the rough seas /crappy weather, we only snorkeled once, at Steps Beach. It was beautiful though. A little murky, but fabulous elkhorn corals, lot of sea fans and fish and a ham of a hawksbill turtle. She swam right up to Michael begging to have her picture taken. He took some video of her, which will appear somewhere on this blog sometime in the future.

The Rincon rea as a whole seemed pretty safe. It was quite disconcerting to me though, that there were big signs all over proclaiming: “Pelligro! Zona de Tsunami!”

Yikes! That’s gotta be pretty bad for tourism! I did lie awake a couple of times wondering if the sea would disappear while we were there and then return to sweep us away. I imagine there is some sort of alarm system, but who knows…..

The guest house we stayed in was chosen by me. It was a little off the beaten path, not in Rincon proper. I wanted to stay there because the sea frequently hits the building. Our room was on the second floor, and we commonly felt the entire house shake when the waves were larger. Our hosts were in the room directly below us. They must have gotten splashed a lot.

A couple of times, we walked right off the porch onto the beach, and walked in the sand (with a few rocky areas) among the waves for an hour or so. It’s an interesting place to be, but I’m too nervous to ever live in a place like that.

It was nice enough. It differed from SunDog House in that it was a smaller space than we’re used to. An electric two burner stove top wouldn’t have worked in a power outage. It had a jacuzzi tub, which also wouldn’t have worked in a power outage. It lacked a pool, dogs (of course), and it wasn’t as clean as our house.

It was on a side street, but there was frequent loud traffic at all hours. It was charming in that horses were ridden by a few times and the cat, Irene, was friendly and cute.

All in all, our vacation was not as good as we expected it to be. But the company was good, we read a few interesting books (discovered a new-to-us author!) and had a change of scenery.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 10:26 am and is filed under Reviews, St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.