When you get lost...stop and enjoy the view.


Saturday morning, I sent Amanda a text that read, “There’s only a 30% chance of rain for today.  Want to go on an adventure?”  We decided to go hiking in the Toro Negro Forest in the afternoon—a state forest I had never been to, about an hour’s drive from where we live.  Jenni and Kelsey (and of course Josh) decided to come along, so by 12:30 the five of us were loaded into the car and headed west on the expressway.

My most trusted PR travel website had been down in the morning, so I didn’t have their easy to follow directions in hand, but I had mapquested our route and written down the directions.
It soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to be a day of easy travels, though.

First, we missed our exit on the freeway.  When we hit Ponce, we turned around, keeping our eyes peeled for the Juana Diaz exit.  We’d only gone 10 kilometers too far, and with the help of google maps on my phone, we found the correct road.

We turned onto PR 149, and had no trouble spotting our next turn onto PR 514.  The directions (and the gps map on my phone) told us to just stay on 514 until it intersected with PR 143.  We drove along the narrow, winding roads, and the hills became steeper and steeper.  Josh had his foot to the floor, and still the car crept up the blind hills at a snail’s pace.  We held our breaths, crossed our fingers, turned around another bend, and were met with…a dead end?  Wait.  That can’t be right.

Dead end on PR 514.  Don't let it get ya! 


We stopped the car and asked a local who was conveniently outside.  He told us to go back to the intersection with PR 5514 and turn there (definitely not on the directions).  We did that, and found our way to PR 143 eventually.  Once we got there, we were faced with the decision: follow the directions and turn right, or turn left, as the gps made it look like the state forest lay mostly in that direction?  We turned left.

Wrong answer.
After maybe 20 minutes of driving (on a wider, flatter, yet still mountainous road), we stopped, got out for a few pictures, and decided to turn around.  We stopped once more for directions and confirmed that yes, we should have turned right at the intersection.

Photo from our turn-around spot

We stopped twice more to confirm directions before we reached the Information Center of the forest.  We hopped out to pick up a trail map, (met a SUPER cute stray puppy), and found that the door was closed, and no one was around.  Though the station was supposed to be open until 4pm, looking at the guest book, it seemed no one had been there that day since 10:45am.  They must have decided to close up early.

locked doors.

SUPER cute stray puppy

By this time it was almost 3:30pm, and we knew we weren’t going to get a good hike in for the day.  One trail started right across the street from the ranger station (and was clearly labeled “Camino El Bolo”), so we decided to follow it for a bit.

We walked for about half an hour along the wide, lush path, before deciding that it wasn’t worth following the trail to completion, since we didn’t know where it was headed, whether it looped, or how long it was.  So, we turned around and made our way back to the car.

Camino El Bolo, Toro Negro Forest

On the plus side, we got a few good things out of the day.  We can get back to the forest pretty easily now (and next time it won’t take us 2 ½ hours to get there), we had an entertaining (and beautiful) drive through the mountains, and we still got an hour’s walk in the cloud forest out of it.
All in all, it was really a pretty good Saturday afternoon!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cambodia: Reflections and Highlights

Image
I was really excited to visit Cambodia for a few days and hit up Angkor Wat and the other temples in the area.  Cambodia felt like my kind of adventure--and I can’t even really say why.  But I was excited.  I was excited for our hotel there--a full-out boutique hotel (not a hostel), with AC, a swimming pool, breakfast included, and airport pick-up for free--which cost us a scant $20 per night.  And we’d read about a lot of great tours we could take with local guides.  Flying in and flying out, this leg of the trip would be a breeze, and hopefully everything would be as cheap as the hotel.   The Mango Rain Boutique Hotel Our flight to Cambodia was unlike any other I’ve ever been on.  There were only about 20 of us on the flight--which would not have been strange, except it was, because we were on a full-size plane that could have seated 200.  The 20 of us were mostly grouped together towards the back of the plane.  Second impressive thing was that as soon as the plane got to al
Read more

DI Globals 2016: A Tale of Two Teams

Image
For the past 3 years, I have acted as a team manager for Destination Imagination at my school in Guatemala, and each year, my team has earned a trip to Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee.  This school year, I was blessed to manage the exact same team I had last year—the Aguaguates, the most wonderful group of kids any DI team manager could wish for.  This group, all 7 th graders this year, has everything needed to not only excel at DI, but also make a team manager’s job almost unnecessary.  They have amazing team chemistry, and they understand the importance of teamwork.  They’re crazy creative and hilarious and amazing actors when they get on stage.  They push themselves to improve their performances.  They know what they need to get done for DI, and they create their own practice schedules.  In short, they are a DI dream team, not to mention really, really great people .  This year though, I took one look at the school calendar and decided that if the team qualified for Glob
Read more

Yearly Update: The Journey to 30

Image
Over a year has passed since my last “update.”  And the year I was 29, despite the fact that I lived close to home rather than abroad, was anything but boring, so there’s no real reason for the lack of blog posts.   The year I was 29, I survived what may have been my most difficult year of teaching yet.  Many overseas teachers say, “Teaching in the States is so much different than teaching abroad.  You’ll see.  That’s why I went overseas; I’d never go back to teaching in the States.  It’s just...too much.”  Well, they’re not wrong.  I admit, I thought that with five years teaching experience under my belt, my first year in the US, my first year at the high school level, would go rather smoothly.  While in a sense it did (no concerns about the quality of my work from administration or complaints from parents), it was mentally and emotionally very taxing.  Even this year, my 2nd back in the States, I’m still adjusting to and coming to terms with the fact that as a US teacher, I wil
Read more