Puerto Rico

Spent the week of 9/27 to 10/4 in Puerto Rico. Been working with the local HP site there to move a fairly large portion of our business from our local supplier here in Roseville down there. It's become my full time job over the last 3 months and will be for probably another 9 months. Since it's been nearly a year since my last visit, and we're now officially underway, I was able to go down and see how things are coming along.
This shot was taken from Villa Montana, a place I really wanted to stay at, but they were booked up when I made the reservation. This was a rather quickly planned trip, as I only got approval to travel about 2.5 weeks before I left. Villa Montana has a restaurant called Eclipse, that has the best food of all the places I've eaten there. The resort is right on the beach, I hear it's great to get up and snorkel in the morning before go to work. I've only been there after work, looking at the sunset. My next trip is already booked for the week of Dec 7th, and I have my reservation for here, so looking forward to checking it out. Only drawback, or maybe a huge plus, is there is very poor cell reception at the resort.

This photo was taken at a little place, right off the road called Happy Bellies. I first came to Happy Bellies about 10 years ago on my first visit to Puerto Rico on HP business. The place serves good cheap food. I haven't been there at night, but I hear they have great drink specials, loud music and very popular with the college crowd.

One of the benefits of flying on Sunday and Saturday, is that you get a full 5 days to be in the office while traveling. Many people refuse to travel on the weekends, which makes getting travel approved more difficult and you get less accomplished. Since I allowed for the full 5 days, we were actually able to wrap up most of the work after 4 days. We took the last day for a little team building. The site manager, for our business, is Orlando Pena. This is his boat. He offered to take me and a some of the other managers working on this project out for a day of fishing and snorkling.

Some of the things we saw, were amazing. Hard to capture the beauty with an iphone camera. I can kick myself for not bringing my water camera. You can bet I won't make that mistake in Dec, when we return. The water was very warm and even though we were about 2 miles offshore, there were these mangrove islands that had all these shallow areas you could walk around in.

That's the team. From left to right, me, Sammy, Manny and Orlando. Of course the fishing pole, which was used, but no fish were harmed this day.
Underwater was nice, Manny came decked out with his water camera, spear gun and dive knife. So he took several of these pictures.

One thing I learned on this trip was that where the HP plant is, and where I stay is in the town of Aguadilla, which is on the North West side of the island and on the Atlantic Ocean. Where we went to Snorkel, was on the South West side of the island and is in the Caribbean Ocean.


What a great way to spend a day. It's a good group of people and I'm looking forward to seeing them again. They'll be coming to Roseville in Nov.

This last photo is from Orlando's second/weekend home, which shows the docks where his boat is and the mangrove islands where we did some of our snorkling.