Merry Christmas from El Yunque

What better way to spend a day when everything except Walgreens is closed than to trek through the only rainforest in the US park system? It was warm (like California), wet (like Oregon), and featured plenty of evergreens (like your living room). So yeah, Christmas.

We spent the 23rd recovering at a beach resort in Combate--Karen and possibly Jonathan have contracted what I got--before driving to Ponce yesterday. Nice city--good size, quaint center, great art museum. Though we ate at what might have been the only restaurant open on Xmas eve, it was one of the best meals we've had.

Not unlike the one MD and I shared this morning. Off 52, near Guavate, lays what's known as the highway of pork. Dozens of lechoneras, each roasting multiple whole pigs on spits, hack into the beasts with machetes and serve it up in gut-busting quantities. Besides the pig, there's chicken, blood sausage, rice, plantains and macaroni salad. We split a plate (it was only 10:30) and it was still too much. But the best part was the skin: after roasting on a spit for 10-12 hours, the fat hardens into a crispy, toffee-like wafer that's crunchy and salty and porky and good. Bourdain had it right: this does not suck.

Karen was grossed out and waited in the car.

But the locals were stocking up for tonight, Puerto Rican mothers and grandmothers walking out with pounds of the stuff for tonight's feast. Lechoneras: the Honey Baked Hams of Puerto Rico. But better.

Merry Xmas, and enjoy whatever's hitting your table tonight.