We have returned home after a ten‐day visit to Puerto Rico, spending the first few days being pampered by the staff of the La Concha resort in San Juan and finishing the trip with a stay in Añasco.

The island, named Boriquén by its original inhabitants, was visited by Christopher Columbus in 1493, who named it San Juan Bautista. Juan Ponce de León, a member of Columbus’s crew, returned several years later as the first Spanish governor of the island, giving the name Puerto Rico to the harbor we know today as San Juan. The harbor is the closest in the Caribbean to Europe and, during the Age of Sail, was often the first stop for vessels having crossed the Atlantic, whose crew would refit and replenish once there. My assumption is that the name Puerto Rico first became a synecdoche for the entire island through references made by those ship‐borne visitors, who would not have ventured beyond the hills surrounding the port.

Being a sailor and finding myself in the heart of the Caribbean, I spent time each day gazing seaward, watching the weather, and thinking about the historic events that had occurred on the waters around me. My own family lore claims the English buccaneer Sir Francis Drake as an ancestor, who attacked San Juan from the sea on November 22, 1595.

Remaining on the grounds of the resort was a tempting answer to the recurring question, Where to eat? The food and service at the resort were excellent, and the view was hard to beat. We did, however, manage to drag ourselves away from the pool to discover Condal across the street from the hotel and Oceano a block or two up Avenida Ashford, both of which were well worth wandering away from the resort to try. The evening at Oceano featured a cigar maker hand‐rolling Puerto Rican tobacco, and standing on the Oceano roof deck in the light of the moon, listening to the surf of the Caribbean, and smoking a robust Puerto Rican cigar made me feel like a pirate king. A good cigar is a smoke.

Knowing that between 56% and 85% of the population of the island identifies as Roman Catholic,¹ I was amazed to see Condom World on the block with the hotel. Pope Paul VI made plain in his epistle Humanae Vitae that contraception is a Bad Thing,² and yet the Open sign was shining in the window on this island of believers. Several things came to mind. One was that in the States, we have Liquor Barn but not Condom World. Another was that the Puerto Rican government recently froze condom prices to prevent Zika profiteering, while in the States, the extortion by Mylan of consumers of its EpiPen is met with little more than thoughts and prayers in the halls of Congress. Condom World has not had an existence free of religious objections from the surrounding community; its logo is a smiling cartoon wearing a condom as a cap, flashing thumbs up, so it hardly seeks to escape notice. Its presence on the streets of San Jose seemed remarkably practical, was altogether unexpected, and is delightfully secular and unabashed.

We spent an afternoon exploring Castillo San Cristóbal, which was built virtually encompassing the original, walled city of San Juan. It was the largest fortification built by the Spanish in the New World and has been within the jurisdiction of the U.S. National Park Service since 1961.

Although the metric system of measurement has been compulsory in Puerto Rico since 1860 and its use is thus pervasive, speed limits are nonetheless posted in miles per hour. It was very puzzling to see a height warning sign on an overpass specify meters while simultaneously cruising past an adjacent speed limit sign specifying miles per hour. Why, I wondered, are speed limits not posted in kilometers per hour? The most plausible explanation I have since uncovered for these exceptions to the use of the metric system is that the majority of cars sold in Puerto Rico are manufactured in the United States, and their speedometers typically do not indicate kilometers per hour.

Driving in Puerto Rico requires vigilance and patience. Traffic in San Juan can be nearly as bad as rush hour in Seattle, which is bad. Throughout the island, it is accepted behavior for drivers to stop in the middle of the road in order to collect their thoughts or to buy a mango from a vendor on the shoulder of the road, which is utterly bizarre to see when one is accustomed to sharing the road with people who are determined to arrive first. The major highways were in good repair, but it was easy to wander off into the hills and find roads that were seemingly engineered using the breadth of two mules as a standard gauge and built with shovels. Where homes and businesses cling to the hillside overlooking the karst, many spare only the width of a sidewalk between the edge of the road and their front doors.

We discovered to our dismay that Starbucks coffee beans are not stocked by the grocers in Rincon. This was certainly a first‐world dilemma, but, while solving the problem of finding a suitable alternative, we met several people who, having overheard our discussions with clerks at various grocery stores about good coffee, sought us out in the aisles to recommend their favorite local roasts.

We had been told not to miss an attempt at paddle boarding, and so one afternoon we had the nice folks at Rincon Paddle Boards give us a lesson. I discovered a knack for falling off the damned thing, but had a great time trying and did manage to stay up long enough between dunkings to understand why the activity is popular. Many of the wait‐staff in the restaurants where we ate who were not native Puerto Ricans told us they had come to Rincon for the surfing, and the owners of Rincon Paddle Boards were also in the came for the surfing category. It was fun to see how they had leveraged their love of being on the water into a business that appeared to be producing a living.

In a letter to Henry Miller, Paul Bowles wrote, One can set one’s life metronome at the speed that seems convenient for living. In the States, the constant reminder that time is passing, that one must be quick, removes all the savor of being in the midst of living. Sitting on the patio at Añasco in the morning with a cup of coffee, listening to the surf and the stirring of the palms, was a sure way to establish a lento rhythm for the day. At night, the stars in the welkin fixed the gaze, as, while the coquí sang a lullaby, the remaining cares of the day stole away.

On February 14, 1990, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to exit our solar system, NASA pointed its camera at Earth and took a photograph of our planet from nearly four billion miles away. The photo — the famous Pale Blue Dot photo — inspired Carl Sagan, the astronomer, to observe in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space , that Earth is a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Since I was a boy looking up at the moon as men first practiced reaching it, then orbited, and finally landed on it, any mention of the great enveloping cosmic dark rings me like a tuning fork. I developed an interest in physics in part because I rejected numinous explanations for observed phenomena and was unable to resist its philosophers. From a household of books and summer nights sleeping outdoors, I learned that the universe could be made to give up its secrets, and yet its scale was almost beyond the capacity of imagination. Those who sought to understand it were naturally in my favor, and any news of the latest experimental apparatus was given my enthusiastic attention. The Arecibo Observatory is one such instrument, and I made certain that a visit to see it first hand was on the agenda for our trip.

Leaning on the railing of the patio adjacent to the visitor center while gaping at the antenna transported me back to my childhood, reminding me of the wonder of dawning realization that, while the infinite surrounds us, it need not overwhelm us. Here is a place conceived to conduct experiments on how best to track intercontinental ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere of Earth, existing today to explore on a galactic scale, yet it is altogether familiar as an artifact of human endeavor: the parabolic dish looked as if it would benefit from some soap and water, the docent made sure to mention the Hollywood movies in which the Observatory has appeared, and one exited most easily via the gift shop. As I posed for photographs that would prove I had stood on the spot, I considered the juxtaposition of the marvel of scientific ingenuity at my back and the work being done with it in the basement with the unremarkable commercial veneer that had been grafted onto it, and fit the details into my personal narrative describing the human need to make the extraordinary appear commonplace. I understood that many around me may not have known what a pulsar is, yet, if driven only by a guide book or the insistence of their elementary school teacher, had made the same pilgrimage as I to peer over the shoulders of the natural philosophers. Seventeenth century proponents of the view that scientific theories are directly induced from experimental results and observations were reminded by Thomas Hobbes that human reason preceded experimental techniques and their application. We make the infinite appear within our grasp when we say, Come, let us reason together. These are the things I thought as I looked into the sky overhead at Arecibo and was happy.

An important question for me in all circumstances is, Where is the good food? At Rincon, we thought dinner at Shipwreck Bar & Grill was really satisfying, and the service was pleasant and applied just the right amount of island time. In contrast, Picoteo Salsa on the hill a few blocks from the condo was abominable: the service was risible, and the food was cold and tasteless. We wished we had found Brasas at the Rincon Beach Resort instead, because we would have gladly eaten there twice to avoid eating once at the horrid Picoteo Salsa.

An advantage to not having a rigid trip plan is that time is left free to allow serendipity to influence the schedule. Exploring the cave system formed by the Camuy River was one such activity we had not anticipated before leaving home.

One must arrive early in the day to secure a place on a tour of the caves, as the available space fills quickly, but it is well worth the ringing alarm clock. A ride on a tram descends into the humid region of the entrance to Cueva Clara de Empalme, where a guide leads the way into the subterranean space. There is a restricted path through the cave system, and most of the estimated 800 caves remain unseen during the tour, but those portions of the system that are included on the ramble through the twilight are stunning and awesome. The largest cavern through which one passes on the guided walk is 215 feet high, and everywhere the limestone formations are beautiful and otherworldly. The opening to the sky from Sumidero de Empalme in the adjacent photo was 180 feet overhead and easily spanned 60 feet. We could hear the river running headlong through the cave and knew there were bats sharing its confines, while focused on the sensation of having been transported to a prehistoric moment to witness the work of nature before it had been interrupted by men.

Were the world not a larger place than we will have time to see in our lives, we would enthusiastically return for another visit to Puerto Rico: the people we encountered who were not getting paid to be considerate to us were nevertheless helpful and friendly; the island is beautiful; and the culture is lively with a rich history. But we will probably not return, although we may pass nearby, and are thankful that we seized the opportunity for this one look.