Drinking Bacardi Rum for Breakfast

Bacardi Rum for breakfast – it’s gotta be 5 o’clock somewhere (Mona and Cindy)

Still in Puerto Rico and loving it. Our dear friend Mona arrived and is staying with us for a full week. She makes the most delicious homemade cookies in the world and lugged about 3 dozen of them in her carry-on as a special treat just for us. Mona is our point of contact when we are on the move. She knows exactly where we are at any given time. When at sea, we have a daily check-in time so she knows all is okay. It gives us peace of mind knowing someone on land is looking out for us and will call SAR if we go missing. In return, Mona has her own suite aboard the Puffster and is welcome anytime. We love it when she comes to visit.

We rented a car with a plan to do all sorts of touristy things. Driving here is not easy. To begin with, the road signs, if you are lucky enough to see one, are in Spanish. We quickly learned the difference between Norte, Sur, Este and Oeste. There is little striping on the road. The Puerto Ricans just make their own lanes. Rather than wait for an opening in the traffic, drivers will edge into an intersection until they are about half way across and then they wave to thank you for letting them go. Pare (stop) signs are purely optional. The roads are full of huge pot holes. I’m talking massive bone jarring swallow your car size portholes. The locals think nothing of making a left or right turn from the middle lane. No one uses turn signals – ever. Very few people honk their horns unless you are about to hit them (ask me how I know this). You do not see arms waving at you or road rage. Although the traffic is aggressive it moves fairly calmly. People don’t seem to get upset here when driving. The distance signs are in kilometers but the speed limit signs are in miles per hour. I think the island went metric but the government chose not to replace the speed limit signs since nobody pays attention to them anyway.

Yeah baby! Keep pouring

We started a day at the Bacardi Distillery. The tour starts with a rum drink. On this day this was our excuse to start drinking at 10:30 in the morning. We somehow got left behind on the tour. We smelled various different types of rum at one of the exhibits. When we looked up, nobody else was around. The group and tour guide had moved on leaving us in a room by ourselves. Why do these things always seem to happen to us? Not to worry. Without the guide about, I was able to take some pictures in the museum area where photographs are not allowed.

The lobby of the visitor’s center with the prominent bat logo displayed

No pictures allowed area – the history room of the museum

We came out of our vestibule to find the tour group had move on without us. Oops!

I so badly wanted to push on these to see if they were empty or not fastened down. That’ll teach the tour guide to leave us!

Unfortunately the tour was a bit of a bust. All the stuff they showed us was in a visitor’s center with poor quality movies and stupid displays of empty barrels and cases. We did not see any of the aging barrels or the production area of the plant. This was disappointing. The history of the rum was interesting but the video quality and sound of the displays was terrible. During the Bacardi tour there was a lot of chest pounding about Bacardi being the top selling rum in the world. The very grainy low definition movie hyped how wonderful Bacardi rum has a dominate market share. A quick Google search found that although they might be the top in the world due to wide distribution, they are not number one in Puerto Rico. That’s pretty sad considering the presence they have here in Puerto Rico. Just because they make a lot of it doesn’t mean it is quality rum. Don Q rum continues to outsell Bacardi in Puerto Rico.