Written 945pm, Friday 31 August on Crown Princess at 18° 31.72′ N, 65° 48.20′ W
Today was our port call to San Juan.
It rained off and on, and my wife wanted to shop, so I’ll admit that I didn’t see all that much of the city. I did get a little bit of the local flavor, but having realized over the past few days that I’m not really a fan of heat and humidity, going from one air conditioned store to another was fine with me.
We accomplished another of our goals for the trip today. My wife is a casual smoker (please, no lectures on that; you’d be preaching to the choir here). We both find the level of sin tax imposed on cigarettes in Connecticut to be outrageous. So, my wife was hoping to stock up at a duty free store this trip.
At Pier 4 in San Juan, there are three duty-free stores (or rather, three storefronts of a duty-free store). Upstairs, inland is the largest of those facilities, and, to cater to cruisers from the mainland, they do sell boxes of 5 cartons of cigarettes. (You can bring home 5 cartons per person, duty-free.)
At $18 per carton, compared to the mid $50’s that my wife is faced with in Connecticut, it’s a deal that needed to be taken advantage of.
One shadow was thrown on our trip today. Our cell phones work in Puerto Rico, so we checked messages. One of those messages was from the fraud prevention unit of one of my wife’s credit card companies. It seems that someone has cloned her card and is having a nice vacation in Mexico. The bank shut down the card…which explained the nastygram we got from the purser’s office this evening. A quick trip to the purser’s desk took care of that, but still… well, we’ll chalk this down as just another installment in the “interestingness” of our lives.