toughest day of our move to puerto rico

We had no idea where we were going to sleep.  Our three-day stay in another unit in our complex was coming to an end.  Both it and the other VRBO unit in our complex were booked.  There was a Holiday Inn nearly 30 minutes away, but it was expensive and a lot further away than we wanted to be.

We wanted to stay close to continue work on our condo.  However, the thought of actually roughing it in our condo felt maybe a bit too close.  Especially with the termite invasion of three nights ago still fresh on our minds.

Our condo had water, but no electricity.  We had no beds or mattresses.  We had ordered them, but it would be a week before they were to be delivered.  Screens were ordered but not due to be installed for another week and a half.

Then, at the last minute, things started happening.

As we were making sure we weren’t leaving anything behind in the condo we were checking out of, I noticed some air mattresses in the closet.  I sent the owner, Juan, an email to see if we could borrow them.

Shortly thereafter, Waylon casually mentions that we have electricity.  I was like, “What!?”  He noticed that our electric meter had been installed.  It wasn’t there just an hour earlier and since it was Friday, July 3rd.  I assumed it wasn’t going to happen until Monday.

I ran up to the condo and flipped on some lights… nothing.  Confused, I walked back to the unit we were checking out of and told Javier, the housekeeper who showed up to get Juan’s condo ready for the next guests.  It turned out that Javier was an electrician and knew just what to do.  “There is a main breaker that needs to be flipped on,” he said, “just call your building maintenance man, he’ll know how to do it”.  So I texted our maintenance man.  Unfortunately, he was not in the area and said he wouldn’t be back at our building until Monday.

“So close”, I thought.  “We have electricity, but we don’t actually have electricity.”  I was thinking through our options when Javier came by and asked how things were going.  I told him the bad news and he said, “I have my tools, let’s go have a look!”.

The breaker box we needed to get into was locked.  No problem – Javier just unscrewed and removed the whole cover.  There was a missing wire.   No problem – he happened to know just where to get one.  I ran upstairs to check the now working lights.  About this time, I received an email from Juan – “Sure, go ahead and borrow the air mattresses as long as you need to.”  I couldn’t believe how beautifully everything was working out.  We thanked Juan and Javier profusely and finished loading the rest of our luggage into our condo.  We were moving in!

I plugged in the pump for the air mattresses to charge it and then we left to go to Mayaguez to shop for essentials.  After a grueling 10 hours of traffic and long lines, we returned to our condo absolutely exhausted and ready for bed.  We grabbed all of our shopping bags and walked up to the door of our complex.

I transferred all the bags to one hand and grabbed my keys with the other.  My key only went about halfway into the keyhole and I wasn’t able to turn it.  I stuck my hand through the bars and tried the lock from the inside.  The key fit, but again, I wasn’t able to turn it.  We put our bags down and I fiddled with it for over half an hour with zero success.  By now it was almost midnight.  I texted the maintenance man in desperation but he didn’t respond.  The boys kept asking me what we were going to do.  Finally, I resigned myself to the reality of the situation.  “Boys, we’re sleeping in the car tonight!”

We loaded our shopping bags back into the rental car.  Fortunately, we had a bug-out bag prepared with toothbrushes and other toiletries.  We used the bathroom in the pool area to brush our teeth and go to the bathroom and then headed back to the car to try to get some sleep.

Even with the all car windows open, it was hot with no breeze in our parking space.  The boys were tired enough to fall asleep pretty quickly.  I, on the other hand, tossed and turned for over half an hour trying to get comfortable.  Finally, I snuck out to try to sleep out by the pool.  As I started to make my way over to the pool area, I spotted a flashlight on in the unit just below ours.  I had only briefly met the owners once a few days earlier, but I decided to go ahead and call out to them.  “Hello”, I said as I waved my arms.  “Is that you David?”  I was relieved that my new neighbors remembered me.  “Yes!  Sorry to bother you but it seems like something is jammed in the keyhole of the lock and we can’t get in”.

Our new neighbors, Luis and Angie, had just closed and were moving in at the same time we were.  Luis came down the stairs and said, “the key they gave me doesn’t work from the inside and it’s really hard to get it to work from the outside”.  He stuck his hand through the bars, jammed the key in, giggled it around and somehow managed to get the door unlocked.  Yes!  Whatever he did also fixed the lock so that my key worked again.  I told him they must’ve given him the wrong key because mine worked easily from both the outside and the inside.  I had an extra copy and gave it to him so as to hopefully prevent that nightmare from ever happening again.  I can’t believe he was even able to make that key work at all!

The boys were still out cold, so I started quietly carrying the shopping bags upstairs to our condo.  I flipped on a light… nothing.  “What is going on?  Everything was working when we left!”  “Well”, I thought to myself, “maybe the pump is charged enough so that we can at least inflate the air mattresses”.  No such luck.  It didn’t turn on, and then I realized it didn’t even have a rechargeable battery in it.  It had to be plugged in to work!

The best we could do was put our newly purchased sheets over the uninflated air mattresses.  Frankly, it wasn’t much better than laying directly on the tile floor.  Of course, the boys being light fell right to sleep when I brought them upstairs.  Thankfully, we did still have water so I could take a shower before laying down.  It was probably around 2 am at this point.  I was happy to be inside, but to say it was uncomfortable would be a gross understatement.  By 6 am, when the sun started to rise, I figured I might’ve gotten about 2 hours of broken sleep at best.

When the maintenance man showed up we found out what had happened.  Our neighbors received their electric meter on the prior day, just like we did.  However, they didn’t know how to flip on the main switch as Javier did for us.  They called our maintenance man who tried to walk them through the process over the phone.  Unfortunately, when Luis put the cover back on the breaker box he accidentally flipped our breaker switch off!

I guess you could say that our new neighbors had locked us out of our condo and turned off our power while we were out shopping.  However, I prefer to say that our dear neighbors, who are a wonderful couple, helped give us a day we will never forget. 🙂