I find it interesting to note that this photo of Gloria holding up Arecibo was taken by David on January 19, 2020 and that year on Dec 1st, Arecibos’s supporting cables snapped and several hundred tons of the instrument came crashing down. They had worked feverishly on a plan that year (after cables snapping in August) to save the instrument used to look far into space for the origins of our universe, and any form of extraterrestrial intelligence – jsykora (from ai.org) “A full listing of the discoveries made using Arecibo would require a whole series of blog posts, but a few notable ones include: a more accurate understanding of Mercury’s rotation, the first exoplanet, and the first repeating fast radio burst. It also was used in ionospheric and atmospheric research, the monitoring of near-Earth objects, and studies of the possibility of extraterrestrial communication.”
David Guerreira – We went to we went to a Chinese place. And ordered, you know, we ordered Chinese. We ordered Chinese food, the three of us, I guess four of us must have been must have been Joanne with us too. So we went to a Chinese takeout place and ordered the food, we had to wait for them to get it. And so as we go to pick up the food, I said, can you throw some chopsticks in there? And the girl said, Oh, no, we don’t use chopsticks, we’re Puerto Rican. So like I never heard that before. All right, all right. So then I went, we got the Chinese food and brought it back to her aunt’s place and opened it up, and I said, I’m sorry I was going to get some chopsticks for us all, but they don’t have any there. And and her aunt said, Yeah, we don’t use chopsticks, We’re Puerto Rican. I’m like, I was waiting for Allen Funt. Yeah, I had. It was and it’s a beautiful place too, Puerto Rico. We did a bunch of stuff. Gloria and I got photos. So we had a great those beach. It’s it’s you know what it’s like. It’s kind of like Hawaii. It’s like Hawaii, right down there, off of Cuba. There was a beach right off them by the fort. I mean, I’m the same one.
Speaker1: Yeah, old San Juan. We never got there.
(Smitty), I dated a girl from Puerto Rico during college, and she took me to , you know, to San Juan. And I don’t know, we went somewhere. I mean, it’s right outside the city. And he was just like went through a path that all of a sudden you just opened up to cliffs in private beach. And oh, just unbelievable. She goes, You can’t go swimming. There’s a riptide to pull you out, you know, but it’s just breathtaking.
(David)It was really nice. I mean, it’s funny, too, because I’ve been to I was at Hawaii twice, you know, for two different purposes. But honestly, it’s like, that’s a place like where if you go there one time you rung it out, you see, honestly, you’re Hawaii, you see what island. You pretty much seen them all. Puerto Rico, though, I mean, if I wanted to go to like a subtropical island, it’s a lot closer. It was just as beautiful once you get out of San Juan, which is just a tropical Bronx. The rest of it was was beautiful, really nice. Very, you know what? The terrain there was very much like it is here, the trees and stuff like that. Yeah, we went around, we were only there a week. We went to see Arecibo before it collapsed. We have spent most of our time like on the beaches, on kind of the western end of the island. We we didn’t see most of the tourist spots we spent. The only time we spent in San Juan was driving through. We were in Old San Juan for one night. An old, her old boyfriend had met us there. We immediately we got the car at the airport and immediately drove out to Old San Juan, which is harder to park in. And he drove out there and met us there and. We had we got she Gloria had gotten some kind of a bed, not a bed and breakfast, an Airbnb place that was really nice, right? You know, they’re very rustic for being in a city. And the boyfriend, Horhey is an old boyfriend. She’s got lots of old boyfriends. And so he he was there to meet her, but they didn’t. It was funny. They didn’t, really. Whatever they had once was gone. He was still trying to maybe I hate to say this, but it was almost like he was trying to own her. And the weird thing was, I wasn’t jealous, maybe because I didn’t figure it out right away, too, but I wasn’t jealous at the time. I kind of stepped back. We got there and he showed up. And I’m like, well, these are old friends, and I’m not going to get in their way, so I just step right immediately in the background and actually I’m surprised I shouldn’t have been surprised. She noticed that, but I figured I’d just let them talk about old times. Or do their old times apply? Within a couple of days or so, we traveled around. I’d have to look on a map to remember the towns, but they were. We went to a couple of towns, had dinner out at a restaurant come discotheque. It was like a restaurant. And then I think at 10 o’clock at night because they had the whole dance floor, they had the whole Saturday Night Fever, lighted dance floor and the crystal ball with the mirrors and stuff. And we just had dinner there. But anyway, he stayed with us a few, a few a couple nights once in Old San Juan and once in that little town, I again, I can’t remember the neighbor at the at the western end of the near the northwest corner of Puerto Rico and. Um, and and something happened. It’s like they weren’t really hitting it off after the two days and we then after we we it was another nice place near the near the beach, an Airbnb that glory had arranged for or somebody arranged for, not me. And then then we the next morning, we went and had and found Arecibo, which is kind of not exactly in the middle of the island, but kind of but near the middle of the island. It’s that big 1000 foot diameter telescope radio telescope. And we went there, you know, drive up this mountain and stuff. Beautiful scenery, man. And it was real. It’s you know what the scenery was just like here. And it’s rural, just like Appalachia, and the houses were a little bit different. But it was the same idea. You’re driving up these winding roads and there’s all of these houses just tucked into hollers. I’m sure they don’t call them hollers in Puerto Rico and just rural people, farm folks. And we went up and spent the afternoon at Arecibo, took the little, you know, they have a museum there where they did at the time. And we saw it, of course, before it collapsed and she was trying to get Horhey. He didn’t get this. She was trying to. She was standing. There’s a spot where you can stand like it’s a radio telescope. So there’s this huge thousand foot diameter bowl down below the viewing platform and up above the viewing flat platform. Five hundred feet away is it’s kind of like the the business part of the electronics. I don’t know. There’s a word for it, but yeah, that’s what it’s all of the it’s all the electronic equipment and the receiving equipment is up there. The bowl itself, it’s just it’s just a big metal dish that’s a reflector. So all the business end of it is up there. And Gloria was holding her hand, is one of those deals where she was trying to do the deal where you’re you’re like holding a palm up and you’re trying to get up to look like you’re holding the thing behind you up in the air. Yeah. She immediately saw that she was being a wise guy with that. And and for some reason, Horhey couldn’t get it, so he couldn’t get it. She was getting kind of like aggravated at him, which is, you know, Gloria. But but I but then I kind of snuck behind him and I got the picture. Oh, good. I got the I took like again, I took like three or four or five shots of it, of various with their hand up or down or here or there. But one of the pictures you got it got it exactly right. So I sent her. She was when we got back home, I gave her the picture and she was all happy about that. So I was real proud of myself that I got the shot. Well, and what else then at a point, I think it was the next day he decided to He left us. He decided they decided to. I forget what we went, where we went to a shopping mall and had lunch or dinner there, and then they had decided that he was going to go his own way. She was going to go or we were going to go our own. And that was it. Then from there, we just went on and we spent the rest of the week with her aunt, Nellie. Over near the again, I don’t remember the name of the town, but it was actually the place where she lives is is in a golf. A resort, it’s inside of a golf resort. What they did is they essentially and they said it was Donald Trump, but they said that. The Trump Organization had bought there was her aunt lived in a like a gated community kind of pretty close to the beach, and the Trump Organization had bought all the land all the way around this whole thing and created a golf course and resort. And so in order to get to this, her aunt’s community, you had to go into the gate for the resort. So we had to go through two gates just to get there. And and then we just spent the rest of the the rest of the week with her aunt. Just, you know, visiting, doing dumb stuff, going down to the beach, whatever Gloria wanted to do. We were going to go, go out and take a little ferry to visit one of the islands off the coast, but it was, I think it was rough weather or something had happened. Oh, I know they’d had the earthquake the week or two before we went, they’d had an earthquake and it buggered up a lot of their stuff. It didn’t damage a lot where I was. But. Or where we were, but it messed up a lot of schedules and things like that. So we never got to that, but we did a bunch of other, you know, just the little dumb things. The big thing we did was we went to Alunko, which is a national park real close to her aunt’s house and drove up there. And there was a same thing and once again, mountain streams that were mountain streams that reminded me of the Blue Hole. For example. Oh, that’s right, you have been to the Blue Hole . I was going to go this week. Yeah, but there’s there’s like all kinds of mountain streams around here and that place, it was a much it was a bigger one, a taller one because it’s a volcanic mountain in Puerto Rico. But we went visited that and just would just drive along, and he’d just stop in some little wading pool and just swim for a few minutes and just go along like that.
Speaker1: And there were other things a lot of wildlife. And things to see, so we got little souvenirs from junk. That was one of the one of the nicer things we did. That’s cool. Then there was butting heads. That’s a whole different story. We were butting heads. We did. We did some good head butting Oh, Gloria was good like that. But now we’re very opposite personalities. Yes, very much so. Look, you know, yeah, we we kind of we’re working it out, and that was a deliberate effort. I know on my part, I think possibly on our part that we were there, we were trying to work it out. The differences in our personalities and staying together and not. Not just walking off, you know, not that I haven’t hung up the phone on her, but you know, we would always get back together after a day or two or start talking. I’ll tell you those stories, too. Yeah. When she gets mad. Right? Yeah. I guess always good. Always good to get mad one time or another. Well, that’s fantastic, I’d love to have that story in Puerto Rico. I got the pictures to go with it. I don’t I don’t know what she did. She would she would have taken pictures to their on her camera, which we don’t know how to get. I mean, our camera phone.
