Tip Tone Presents: Sarah-Bus Cerebus

Trip 20

Trip 20
all stories and essays by John Schmall

San Juan and the Hotels

I took a winter vacation to a warm weather climate for the first time in my life. Bozena (my wife) and I went on a Caribbean cruise. The cruise was fantastic, but the real adventure didn't begin until the ship docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where we found ourselves with four hours to kill before our flight.

Or two days to kill after we decided that it really wasn't all that necessary to rush back to Chicago on a Friday. Why not a Sunday? Yes, Sunday would be ideal.

On a borrowed cell phone at the airport, I was told the spontaneity would cost me an additional $75 per ticket to change the reservation. That seemed a little steep, but I thought, hell, $150 plus maybe $100/night for two nights at a decent place is doable to extend my summer-in-winter another two days.

After waiting around the flight check-in counter, we were told by the agent that changing our flight was impossible because the Sunday flight was already overbooked.

But, wait, the Saturday flight had openings. As did Monday's flight. No $75 per ticket charge for either. We asked for some time to think about it and conferenced like Tom Hanks and his childhood buddy did in Big when deciding how to cash Hanks' first paycheck.

We nixed Saturday; a waste. We decided an extra night in a hotel would still be cheaper than the ticket fees I was willing to pay a few minutes earlier.

We used the airport tourism office to help make reservations at a place called Green Isle Inn in Isla Verde—"close to the beach and casinos." The catalog said $58–84 per night. We were quoted $97 including taxes. Okay, fine.

We took a taxi from the airport to the Green Isle Inn—actually across a major highway and at least three more blocks away from the main strip and beach.

Check-in took at least 20 minutes. The attendant tapped a bit on the keyboard, disappeared, had a conversation in Spanish with a friend who brought him a soda, tapped some more on the keyboard, disappeared again, and finally charges my credit card for three nights' lodging.

We then took a golf cart ride around the corner and down a seedy street to our new home. The catalog picture and reality didn't have a lot in common, and the wife gave me a look that said, "We are NOT staying."

Getting our money back was easier than expected, but as we vacated our room with our luggage, we were confronted by an enthusiastic taxi driver. We weren't quite sure where we were going yet, but I asked him how much to Condado. He said it would be $15 as he placed our luggage in his trunk.

After a few tense and uncertain moments, we were able to regain possession of our bags and started back to the Green Isle Inn office on foot. On the way, we were approached by another guy who seemed relieved that we could understand English. He said that he was held up at gunpoint and needed another $10 to get a room at the Howard Johnson. I simply told him that I was dealing with my own lodging problems at the moment and couldn't really help him.

We weren't sure of the best place to catch a taxi so Bozena and I hemmed and hawed in front of the Green Isle Inn. Eventually a taxi dropped somebody off in front of us. The driver was female and she said it would be $13 to Condado. We jumped in. We encountered "mucho traffic" (the driver's words) on the way to our new lodging, but I was feeling better about things.

While at Green Isle, we made a few phone calls and found a new place to stay in Condado, the Diamond Palace Hotel and Casino. They had an available double room for $145 per night. It wasn't particularly fancy and the hallways were not carpeted so noises tended to echo a bit, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction from where we were. I called for some extra towels and we headed to the beach (now just a half block away) for the remaining few hours of daylight.

The waves crashing into the Condado beach are some of the largest I've ever experienced. They made actual swimming pretty difficult but they were fun to bounce around in. Literally seconds after ignoring my wife's advice to leave my sunglasses on dry land, they were stolen by the sea as a wave crashed over my head and held me under water just long enough to gain my respect.

We spread out our smallish hotel towels next to people in lounge chairs with oversized beach towels that were apparently provided for guests of some fancy beachfront resort.

Back at the hotel, Bozena was the first to discover that the shower in our fifth-floor room only offered cold water. I called the front desk. The maintenance guy came up to check things out. Not surprisingly, he found that there was no hot water. He checked three other rooms and got the same result. The fourth room checked out okay and, after a long phone conversation, he said that we could move there.

Just as we got to dragging our bags toward the room, he said that we couldn't have that room after all and instead moved us into a different room on the sixth floor that apparently checked out okay for hot water. Actually the hot water lasted about half a shower, but we stayed.

We had dinner at a sidewalk café called Latin Star. After dinner we ran into a Canadian couple from the cruise. They had stayed at the Diamond Palace on the night before the cruise and didn't have much favorable to say about the supposed 3-star hotel. The elevator didn't work and it was noisy enough to prevent sleep.

In our experience, the elevator was finicky, but it always got us to our destination...eventually. Sometimes you just had to keep the buttons pushed in.

We were now beginning to believe that it was a bad idea to stay in San Juan. We decided that we would call the airline in the morning to see if we could change our flight to Saturday. If not, we were certainly going to switch hotels again.

After dinner, we paid a visit to the nearby Marriott. Rooms were going for $215 to $240. We went to the Radisson next and were given vague enough pricing to keep us from considering them. We stopped at a ma-and-pa place after that, but we were not considered as important as the incoming cell phone call, so we gave up for the night.

Back at the Diamond Palace, the TV from the next room was quite audible in our room. As that subsided into the background, the street noise was quite remarkable and easy to hear even from our sixth-floor seat. It sounded like a construction site.

We were up early after the sleepless night and called the airline thinking that we'd pay the $150 and get on the Saturday afternoon flight back to Chicago. No such luck. Only "plus" seats were available and changing our ticket would cost us nearly $600.

For that price, we could stay at the Marriott for two nights with money left over, so we headed over to the Marriott where Vivian (I remember her name tag) quoted us $340 per night for a two-night stay.

We tried to explain that less than 12 hours earlier we were quoted $215. She empathized and agreed to give us a room for $215 for the first night but made no guarantees for the second night. Fair enough. We ended up with a fourth-floor ocean view over the hotel pool.

Two surprises were discovered in our room: 1) an open, half-full bottle of Corona in the bathroom behind the shower curtain and 2) no hot shower.

We began to question whether we just like unusually hot showers or maybe people in these warmer climates just don't take hot showers. We reported these findings to Vivian who apologized and confirmed that the water should be hot. She assured us that the water problem would be fixed right away. We got some breakfast and hit the beach.

On this beach visit, WE were the guests of the fancy beachfront resort sporting signature hotel beach towels. After a wonderful day of lounging about, we returned to our hotel room to enjoy HOT showers. The housekeeper had left us a message of apology for the room condition—I'm guessing the beer bottle—with another offer to relocate us. I didn't see the point in moving.

Feeling a little more adventurous again, we took public transportation (a 25-cent bus ride) to Old San Juan, explored a bit, and returned to Condado in time for a late dinner and strong margaritas.

Exhausted and full, we returned to our room for a good sleep. Unfortunately, the thump-thump from the live band playing in the hotel lobby could be heard all the way up in our room. We were so tired that we were able to sleep through it, but the next thing I remember was trying to turn off the alarm and it not stopping.

Maybe it was the phone? Nope. Fire alarm. I groggily scrambled for some pants and made sure we had our passports and identification before we headed out to the hallway and down the stairs. It was about 2:30 a.m. and the band was still playing. As we came out of the stairwell on the main floor, hotel personnel told us that it was a false alarm. Returning to sleep was not easy. The band continued until nearly 5:00 a.m.

A little after 8:00 a.m. on Sunday we were up and about. Considering our experience, the Marriott didn't seem worth the price, especially if the room rate was going to be higher for the second night. At this point, we really just wanted a quiet place to sleep.

We walked over to a little bed and breakfast just around the corner called El Canario by the Sea. Cautiously, we interrogated a group of four people exiting the place. They assured us that it was quiet and clean but not fancy. They considered it a pretty good value for San Juan. We entered. The man behind the desk was courteous, attentive, and pleasant, and we booked the room for $128.

Back at the Marriott, Vivian was working the desk again and she seemed embarrassed as we described our overnight experience. She offered to move us to a higher floor at the same $215 rate for Sunday night. (Why she couldn't offer the $215 rate for Sunday night the previous day is inexplicable to me.)

We told her that we had already reserved a room elsewhere. She said that we could use their facilities for the day, so we ended up with the best of both worlds—economy lodging with the use of luxury amenities.

At around 3:00 p.m., we bid farewell to the Marriott and planted ourselves at El Canario by the Sea, our fourth hotel.

We spent the rest of the afternoon taking pictures of the narrow streets and unique architecture of Old San Juan, purchased some ice cream from a street vendor at a sunset festival, and watched folks fly kites on the great lawn in front of the old fortress.

Our evening at El Canario by the Sea ended up being the best during our stay in San Juan. It was quiet, had a working hot shower, and included a simple but pleasant breakfast in the courtyard.

After breakfast, we wandered wandered around the Condado Lagoon before stopping for a bite to eat and a farewell toast to San Juan and the Caribbean. Soon we were in a taxi and off to the airport.

My uncharacteristic fit of spontaneity turned out okay. As the years pass, it will probably end up being the most memorable part of our vacation.

The weekend we missed in Chicago was the coldest of the winter with temperatures well below zero.