Fruit stand, coffee farm, more fish tacos: July 27, 2013

We stopped at this fruit stand on our way to Hacienda Gripinas, a former coffee plantation in Puerto Rico's mountains.  All coffee is mountain grown, right?  Best bananas and mangos we've ever had!  Maybe because they were tree-ripened and not picked green and shipped?  The farmer and his wife, who own homes in New York and Florida, were on their way to Florida the following week to visit kids and grand-kids. Best news yet for Papa Tom:  this farmer told him there are no squirrels in Puerto Rico! But, somehow, monkeys, which are not indigenous, have gotten on to the island.  He said a monkey hung out at a neighbor's house recently, plucking all the ripe fruit off a tree until the neighbor covered the tree with bags.  I would think monkeys are a lot harder to outsmart than squirrels.  Maybe we should be grateful for our furry bandits?

I wish we had tried the pineapples and papayas too.  Well, the Nikon battery died so we didn't get any photos at Hacienda Gripina.  And we didn't stop to climb to Puerto Rico's highest point because the "trail" was a very steep paved road to some cell towers and the weather was very cloudy.  It would have been a short climb but there's no way we would have seen both the Atlantic and Caribbean, which you can from the top on a clear day.

Back to Bar Gitano for those incredible fish tacos.  See the painting of castanets behind Papa Tom?  I still have the castanets from my childhood days of Spanish dancing in Peru.

Mmm!  Thinking about those fish tacos.