Well relax.

After agonizing over his tempting offer for at least three whole minutes we replied, “You must be joking.”

Or words to that effect.

Meanwhile, it was back to square one for our little project.

In other words, it was time for me to call our second “promising” lead, whose unlikely name was Frederico Franconi and who revealed during our brief phone conversation that he hailed from Aguadilla on the big island, was the proud father of seven children and was called Freddy by all his friends.

He sounded normal enough.

But when he appeared the next morning I was reminded of the old adage, “Don’t judge a ceramic-tile-layer by his voice.”

Let’s start with Freddy’s outfit, which might have been (charitably) characterized as “Ronald McDonald Visits Margaritaville.”

It wasn’t just his sensationally baggy yellow cargo pants that caught my eye—you could have stuffed a mariachi band and a couple of supermodels into the side pockets and still had room for expansion—but also the broad-banded red and white t-shirt topped off with a Hawaiian style “big as a muumuu” duster.

Oh, and he had curly orange hair.

I’m not kidding.

All in all, it wasn’t what you’d normally think of as an “interview outfit” unless you’re hoping to snag a position at Barnum & Bailey.

And yet despite my undoubtedly aghast expression Freddy got right down to business.

“What overall look do you want and how much do you want to spend?” he asked pointedly.

I kept expecting him to hop into a tiny car and speed around our great room or shoot seltzer water down his pants.

But he remained admirably on topic.

“What’s your color palette?” he continued.

“White,” I replied numbly.

He wrote it down. I was impressed. Maybe he wasn’t so freakish after all.

And when he whipped out a camera and began snapping photos of the shower stall I was further swayed. Lots of people wear unusual clothes, I told myself—just take a stroll through the main concourse of any major American airport if you need a refresher course in “what not to wear.”

In fact, by the time he had measured the walls down to the last square inch I found myself mentally extolling the virtues of comfortable casual wear.

And when he handed me a remarkably accurate looking off-the-cuff rendering of the space I blurted out, “You’re hired! And by the way, where did you get that shirt?”

I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for the big top.

In fact, there seem to be at least three on every corner.

Once we’d decided to have our bathroom re-done and started mentioning the project to acquaintances around the island, we were bombarded with glowing recommendations.

“My cousin is the tile-master of Vieques,” our friend Carlos at the sandwich shop proclaimed.

Really?  Tile-master?

Hmm.

Tanya, who sold home-baked goods at the farmers’ market every Tuesday and Thursday, assured us that she had a great guy who “practically works for free.”

Knowing from bitter experience that you get what you pay for—which, in this case, would be “practically nothing”—we politely declined.

This pattern continued for a couple of unconstructive weeks until we eventually managed to track down two solid leads, complete with phone numbers.

I made the calls.

The first guy’s phone manner was abrupt but oddly reassuring.  “You listen me, I give you the great price and the perfect grout.”

As improbably rosy as this scenario sounded, I decided to give him a try.

He showed up at the house an hour late the following morning with a Chihuahua puppy grumbling sleepily in the crook of his arm.

The man’s name was Edwin and he had a lazy left eye, which created the impression that he was winking all the time.

Or not.  It was impossible to tell.

“This is easy job,” he said.

This sounded great until it dawned on me that he had very possibly winked as he’d said it.

“Ha ha,” I replied knowingly, hedging my bets.  “You mean hard, right?”

His eye drifted even further afield.  “No,” he said with maddening consistency, “easy.”

“It looks hard to me,” I countered neutrally, holding my eyes unnaturally wide-open so no one could ever accuse me of winking back.

“Well, a little hard,” he went on, obviously trying to meet me half way.  Or maybe I was just frightening him.

In any case, we were getting nowhere fast.

And I was beginning to sweat.  “Call me,” I mumbled, edging towards the door.

The roving eye roved uncertainly.

“Call me with your estimate,” I explained.  “Tomorrow.”

He called three days later.  “I charge $40 an hour until job is done,” he stated baldly.

My brain reeled.  “But how long will it take?”

“Until it finish,” he replied unhelpfully.

“But surely you have some idea of how long that’ll be.  I mean, will it take a week…or a month?”

“Yes,” was his response.

And although I have no way of knowing for certain, I’m guessing he winked.

“I think I just heard a noise downstairs.”

“I don’t like the look of that CAT scan.”

“We’re out of vodka.”

And, perhaps most horrible of all:

“It’s time to remodel the bathroom.”

These last words were muttered by yours truly late one afternoon as I stood gazing at the master bathroom of our house in Vieques.

As a whole, the house looked terrific. This was hardly a surprise considering that we had replaced, repaired or generally updated every square inch of the place from top to bottom—with the exception of the upstairs bathroom.

This seeming oversight wasn’t because we were in love with the bathroom’s original décor. To be honest, ceramic tiles embellished with diagonal gray stripes and tiny pink roses aren’t our idea of tropical chic.

We just hadn’t gotten around to it.

But standing in the shower a few minutes after my epiphany staring at the pink roses, I realized that one of us had to go—and it wasn’t going to be me.

Gingerly, I broached the topic with Michael.

“You know, this place is looking great,” I commented out of nowhere later that night as we sat in the great room reading.

He looked up from his book and glanced around the space briefly.  “Sure is,” he said, returning to his story.

I leapt to my feet and nervously straightened a picture on the wall.

“Except…” I began.

He kept reading.

“With the exception of, um, you know…”

His eyes never left the page.

“The one part we haven’t gotten to…”

“The bathroom,” he said quietly, putting down his book with an air of ominous patience.  “You think it’s time to re-do the bathroom.”

“Oh well,” I muttered evasively, not quite knowing how to proceed. I had imagined steering the conversation in stately procession from Points A to B to C, but suddenly it had careered from A to Z Minus with lightning speed.

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” I huffed self-righteously.

He flicked some imaginary lint from the front of his polo shirt.  “Then how would you put it?”

I racked my brain for another point of entry, but nothing sprang to mind—except the truth.  “I hate those pink roses.”

He smiled.  “Okay, then let’s get rid of them.”

Oh my god, I said to myself, that was ridiculously easy.  And in the heat of the moment I decided to go for broke.  “How about a new shower?” I soldiered on.

“Sure, why not?” he countered, smiling almost as broadly as before.

“And a new vanity?”  There was no stopping me now.

“Fine,” he agreed, the left corner of his mouth twitching slightly.

“Wow, that’s great!” I exclaimed, grinning idiotically at my run of good luck.

Without another word he went back to his book.

I, on the other hand, was too excited to read. Instead I decided to celebrate the moment with a small cocktail.

But as I sprinted towards the bar Michael spoke up again.

“While we’re at it, how about that pool you’ve been wanting?”

I could hardly believe my ears—had I accidentally drifted into some parallel universe in which even my wildest dreams were destined to be fulfilled?

“What about it?” I replied, positively drooling with excitement.

He picked up his book again.

“We can’t afford it.”

Make that a double.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 15 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

What’s that?

Oh, I see—you’ve been kind of busy and haven’t given it much thought.

Okay, fine (though frankly it wouldn’t kill you to pretend).

In any case—and obviously no thanks to your kind wishes, I might add—we didn’t perish in an unseemly fireball on the Island Grande Airport runway.

In fact, we landed smoothly and were herded back into the airport, which looked depressingly familiar, probably because we had spent the previous five hours languishing in its narrow confines.

The tiny bar was still open, and that’s where we headed, despite that fact that we were 99 percent sure we’d drunk the place as dry as the Kalahari on our previous visit.

The proprietor, not exactly a paragon of hospitality under the most ideal of circumstances, barely glanced up from his newspaper when we stumbled back in, damp and disgruntled.

I fished yet another twenty out of my pocket and eased it across the counter.  “Anything left to drink?”

He kept reading.

“Por favor,” I persisted.  “Gin tonic?”

“All gone,” he mumbled.

“Tengo sed.”

He lowered his paper marginally and scowled. “Lo siento.”

At least we were speaking the same language.

I took out another twenty.

Michael looked marginally alarmed but held his tongue—he knew better than to get between me and a bottle of Tanqueray.

Flutterings of interest registered on the proprietor’s face.

“Quizà…” he muttered vaguely, putting aside his paper and drifting toward the back room.

Five minutes later he remerged with a dusty bottle of rum and a box of surprisingly plump mangoes.

“Daiquiri?” he teased.

“Hmm…” I stalled, pressing down on the twenties.  “Got a blender?”

“Si,” he replied, almost (but not quite) cracking a smile.

We were in business.

Oddly, his next move was to scuttle out from behind the bar and lock the door of his little eatery.  “Too much customer,” he remarked, inconsequentially, to no one in particular.

Five minutes later the three of us were slurping down the most delicious daiquiris ever.

At some point—I’m a little hazy on the particulars after approximately the third sip—our erstwhile flight mates (the chatty lady and her sullen offspring) rattled the locked door, trying to get in.

“Cerrado!” our barkeep called out merrily.

“Closed!” I translated helpfully.

Through the door’s small, smudged window the woman caught my eye and shot me a distinctly unfriendly look.

And when we were finally airborne and winging our way toward Vieques an hour later, she maintained a decidedly frosty demeanor.

I felt bad.

Kind of.

Actually, to be honest, I was far too happy to care.

Not the most brilliant timing in history, I mused, but good news all the same, particularly since we’d been loitering in the airport all afternoon waiting for one of the most bone-rattling thunderstorms we’d ever experienced to subside.

When I rushed out into the waiting room (checking absent-mindedly to make sure I’d zipped my shorts), Michael and a red-faced airline employee were waiting for me by the door leading to the tarmac. Both appeared to be on the brink of hyperventilating.

“So we waited four hours and now it’s a national emergency?” I couldn’t help muttering.

Michael took my arm and steered me outside. “Let’s just get on the plane,” he said.  “They say there’s a very small window of opportunity for getting us there.”

I didn’t like the sound of this.  Not one bit.

And as we sprinted toward the plane I liked it even less. A steady rain was still falling and a heavy wind was gusting southward from the bay.  The sky was the color of lead.

As in lead balloon.

There were just two other passengers, a middle-aged woman and her teenage son. The mother, visibly nervous, was over-compensating with a steady stream of lame wisecracks. The son, in the time-honored tradition of adolescent males, just looked profoundly bored.

The pilot looked pretty out of it too.  I couldn’t decide if this was a good sign or not.  Maybe flying in this kind of weather was about as adrenalin-generating for him as a stroll in the spring rain would be for me.

On the other hand, maybe he was in the midst of a take-no-prisoners child custody battle with his alcoholic ex-wife and had stopped caring several court appearances ago if he lived or died.

Hard to tell.

As we turned and began taxiing down the short runway, the rain picked up and the wind shook the small craft with a vengeance.  And as the pilot gunned the engine for take-off and we plowed down the runway, the plane listed so violently to the west I was pretty sure we were finished.

The teenager yawned extravagantly as we lifted off into the turbulent skies.

I hated him.

Up we crawled, giant sheets of rain washing over the plane.  It was like being in a massive washing machine that was stuck on some rogue setting between rinse and spin.

“What’s your favorite restaurant on the island?” our female fellow passenger leaned back and asked.

Talk about non sequiturs.

“Uh…” I muttered, my mind definitely elsewhere (to be honest, I was hoping my mother would remember to recite “I felt a funeral in my brain…” as she and 500 of our closest friends, all weeping copiously, spread our ashes over Nantucket Harbor).

“How about Second Course? Have you tried it?”

“Yep, we went there New Year’s Eve,” said Michael, clearly vying with the teenager for the “Calmest Passenger in an Airline Disaster” Award.

“Good, but not great.”

“I like Bananas,” said the teenager, who had not spoken one word all afternoon but decided, now that we were facing certain extinction, to sprout a personality.  “Their fries are the best.”

Frankly I’ve always thought their fries were a bit on the soggy side but since my teeth were chattering so hard my fillings were likely to fly out any minute I decided to keep my opinion to myself.

After five minutes or so, as my fellow passengers nattered on about the pros and cons of Veritas, Conuco and El Quenepo, I noticed that we were flying in the wrong direction.

Very wrong.

As in, due north.  And we were supposed to be flying pretty much due east.

I tugged on Michael’s shirttail.  “Huh?” he said distractedly.

“We’re headed the wrong way.”

“I noticed that.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“Oh, who knows.”

“But we’ve been flying north ever since we took off.”

“Holding pattern,” said the lady.

“Holding patterns are circular,” I replied.

“The fries at Bili’s aren’t bad either,” continued the teenager, obviously determined to divest himself, at this supremely inopportune moment, of all the inane thoughts he’d stored up in his brain during the previous four hours of dead silence.

Just then, the plane banked sharply to the right and began flying due south.

“Looks like we’re headed back to San Juan,” said the lady, gurgling nervously. “Now that was a short vacation.”

Just as I was reflecting that no jury in the world would convict me if I’d strangled her then and there, I turned and looked out the left-hand window and was greeted with a sight that quelled all thoughts, murderous and otherwise…

Yes, dear reader, it was a double rainbow.

Sigh.

Vast sheets of water plummeted down from the heavens and pounded the airport roof. The lights flickered. The ramshackle building trembled and groaned.

Our scheduled departure time came and went, and no one said a word. In fact, it wasn’t entirely clear if anyone working at the airport had even noticed the apocalyptic deluge wreaking havoc just outside the door.

Michael decided to find out. A bored-looking employee greeted him with a grunt at the airline’s shabby desk.

“Any word on the 2:45 to Vieques?” Michael asked.

The man glanced at his watch and said, with no obvious trace of irony, “It delayed.”

Thanks for the update.

“Any idea when it might leave?” Michael continued, determined to wring a few drops of blood from this human turnip.

The man swiveled in his chair and looked through the window toward the howling storm.

“Soon,” he said.  “Or tomorrow.”

And with that he turned back to his computer.

“Oh god, we might have to spend the night in San Juan,” Michael moaned as he sat down beside me.

“No we won’t,” said a red-haired woman sitting across from us.  “I’ve been flying back and forth from this airport for 15 years and unless the propeller falls off—and I mean that literally—we’ll fly.”

I wasn’t sure if this was comforting or not. Yes, I was anxious to get to Vieques, too, but an overnight stay in San Juan seemed a small price to pay when the alternative was fiery death.

As I was pondering our not-so-appealing options, the snack counter proprietor reappeared and removed the padlock from his humble establishment’s door.

I darted inside like a shot.

“Do you have any liquor?” I panted.

“No,” he replied, just as my eye settled on a half-full bottle of Beefeater’s gin on the back counter.

“I’ll give you $10 for a shot,” I hazarded, slipping a crisp note across the counter.

Grudgingly he poured a miniscule drop of gin into a plastic cup. I nudged the note back toward my side of the counter.  “Mas, por favor.”

This time he gave me a full shot…and a bit more. “Any ice?” I asked, going for broke.

“Si,” he answered with a sigh.

Five minutes later I was feeling slightly less gloomy about our impending deaths.

Soon Michael joined me. And for a mere $15 he managed to negotiate a shot of gin and a can of orange juice.

“Got any food?” I asked our surly barkeep, who was listlessly scraping food particles off the kitchen grill.

“Si.”

“Burgers?”

“Maybe.”

“We’d like two.  And fries.”

He looked mortally offended.

“Tu eres un hombre muy agradable,” I shamelessly flattered him with my best junior high Spanish.

He almost-but-not-quite cracked a smile.

“With fries?” he asked.

It was almost like a party.

Or a last supper.

Oh right.

I was telling you about our first-ever flight out of Isla Grande Airport.

I must say the day got off to an unusually smooth start. Our flight from D.C. to San Juan was almost on time, give or take a couple of hours. But who’s counting?

And it was populated by fewer screeching toddlers than usual.

Plus, no one in our immediate vicinity appeared to be afflicted by the plague.

Or even a cold.

Clearly the gods were with us.

Our run of good luck continued in San Juan.  The weather was so perfect it was almost a cliché—azure skies punctuated by the occasional puffy cloud, a light breeze, 80 degrees…

…and our taxi driver greeted us with such unusual courtesy we couldn’t help wondering if he had mistaken us for someone important.

Admittedly, the actual taxi ride from San Juan International to Isla Grande was a trifle hair-raising, but after we had peeled our nerve-endings from the interior of the van and administered a few vertebral self-adjustments we were almost as good as new.

Isla Grande airport reminds me of the past—though not necessarily in a good way. Instead of evoking gauzy images of bygone elegance, it lands you with a huge splat into the middle of the inelegant seventies, when fiberglass suspended ceilings were all the rage and red plastic chairs ruled the land. Throw in a dollop of chalky white paint and a shifty-eyed photo-portrait of a Puerto Rican military hero and you’ve pretty much got the idea.

Once we’d checked in I suggested we grab a drink before our flight.

“A drink?” Michael all but sneered. “In this joint?”

There are those who might have been put off by his tone but I’m not so easily deterred, particularly where alcohol is concerned.

“There’s a little snack bar over there,” I said hopefully.

“Good luck,” he countered.

But just as I made a beeline for the snack bar’s entrance the proprietor sauntered out with a spiteful little flourish and locked the door.  With a padlock.  I’m not kidding.

Then he scuttled away, leaving us dry and not at all high.

With the specter of sobriety rearing its ugly head, we broke out our Kindles and attempted to distract ourselves for the next hour or so with Literature instead of Liquor.

But as we began to immerse ourselves in our respective reading material we couldn’t help noticing that it was beginning to get dark outside. What had happened to our perfect day?

A quick glance through the smudged airport window told the story.

Thunderstorm.

A big one.

Uh oh.

But once we’ve dragged our bones out of bed at 4:00 a.m. and flown four hours from D.C. to San Juan surrounded by choruses of screeching toddlers…

…I must admit we’re not enthusiastic about anything more strenuous than schlepping to an adjacent concourse in San Juan International to make our connection to Vieques.

Quite literally, the last thing we want to do is jump in a taxi and sprint across the city to depart from a different airport.

But once it sank into our thick noggins that a reasonably short taxi ride could save us hundreds of dollars each time we headed to our vacation retreat, we reluctantly abandoned our practice of connecting through the big airport…

…and switched to Isla Grande Airport instead.

In more ways than one, the switch has been a trip.

First, of course, is the taxi ride.  Taxis in San Juan always smell like something really bad happened in the back seat a couple of hours before you got in (dismemberment, anyone?), at which point the driver obviously panicked and overcompensated by blasting the interior with three or four cans of air freshener.

The AC is invariably turned up to “Arctic Circle” (maybe that’s what “AC” stands for), and the windows are usually rolled all the way down, ensuring that you’re buffeted with simultaneous, sinus-challenging gusts of hot and cold air—which you hardly even notice because you’re desperately searching for your seatbelt (AWOL) while trying to avoid concussion as the driver weaves wildly in and out of 65 mile-per-hour traffic.

After whizzing past lots of un-noteworthy sites, each one more generic and run-down than the one before, the new convention center looms suddenly and impressively to the left…

…and if you’re lucky, a cruise ship much bigger than most hotels hovers to your right…

…and then you turn down a rutted lane that may or may not qualify as an alley but doesn’t remotely resemble an airport access road.

The first time we flew out of Isla Grande I suspected the driver had either lost his way or was driving us to some forlorn outpost of the city to rob and/or murder us. But just I as tried (and failed) to imagine expiring in such an un-lovely spot, the driver turned yet another corner and the little airport sprang into view.

At first glance, it’s hard to believe this was the main airport serving San Juan until the early ‘50s, when most of the action shifted to the new, much bigger airport across town which could accommodate jets.

Clearly no one has given more than five minutes’ thought to Isla Grande Airport since about 1954. To say it’s modest would be an understatement.  Actually, a compliment.  Its stark utilitarianism is outstripped only by its air of benign neglect.

On a good day it reminds me of an abandoned rec room in a remote psychiatric facility; on less felicitous days it begs comparison with a waiting room in a third-world-country hospital emergency room.

And yet, in spite of its homeliness, we’ve grown to love it.

Trust me.

Next time I’ll tell you all about the first time we flew out of Isla Grande—cocktails, rainbow and all.

Yep, that’s what I said.  Nice linens.

As in big fluffy white towels…

…and high-thread-count sheets.

I can’t emphasize this point enough.

Yes, our house is always super clean, thanks to our tireless crew, and attractively decorated, thanks to random moments of inspiration on our part, but needless to say Ian Schrager has never crossed our threshold.

And yet, even if something goes completely haywire—the electricity shuts off, the phone decides to take a week-long break—we get consistently positive feedback from our guests.

Admittedly we try to anticipate their every need, right down to cocktail shakers, muffin tins and first aid kits.

But even so, soft goods seem to be the tipping point.

Case in point: an upcoming guest from New York, after booking our house via email, scared us half to death with his endless list of demands in the weeks leading up to his stay.

“Ron” (not his real name, but I make it a policy to protect the guilty whenever possible) called me on a daily basis to ask me if our house included:

• a gym
• a cappuccino maker
• a lap pool
• remote-controlled retractable windows
• an infinity pool
• an Aga stove (feel free to look it up, but here’s a photo of one if you’re in a hurry)

When I replied, apologetically at first and then slightly less so as the weeks wore on, “unfortunately we don’t” to all these queries, he seemed enormously miffed, as if we’d somehow misrepresented our property.

I kept referring him back to our webpage, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Within 24 hours he’d simply call back with yet another bizarro question: are there any houses within 500 yards of your property line?

“Yes,” I replied, “our house is in a quiet residential neighborhood.”  Then I steered him back to the webpage for a quick reality check.  But he just seemed miffed all over again.

We called Jane and warned her about this guy.  We were sweating bullets for her—and for us.

“This guy has a serious case of delusion. Don’t take any lip from him,” I advised her.

“Don’t worry!” she said brightly, obviously not the least concerned (I told you Jane’s a tough cookie).

But we steeled ourselves for trouble anyway.

And yet the day of Ron’s arrival came and went with no irate phone calls from him or desperate pleas for mercy from Jane.

“Maybe they had a shoot-out and they’re both dead,” I remarked to Michael that night.

“Otherwise surely we would have heard something.”

Unable to contain myself my curiosity any longer, I called Jane the next morning.

“Okay, what’s the story?”

“What story?”

“About Ron.  Has he been difficult?”

She laughed.  “Well, he was a tad peevish when we drove up to your house and there was no pool.”

“Huh?”

“He said you advertised a lap pool.”

“Jane…” I began.

“Calm down,” she laughed.  “I know you didn’t tell him any such thing.  But wait, it gets worse.  He walked through the house like Martha Stewart on steroids, pointing out every tiny imperfection.  I kept expecting him to pull out a pair of white gloves and spot-check for dust.”

“Oh god.”

“But the strangest part is, he called this morning and said how much he adores the house.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.  He couldn’t stop raving about the crisp sheets and the big fluffy towels.  The guy’s a pussycat.”

I rest my case.

If good-quality linens can win over “Ron,” they can win over anyone.