Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Excerpts from the Book "You Can't Make This Shit Up!" Chapter Odd Road Things

No photos in this one. I took a couple but didn't need to keep them. That means this will be a short post of something else that is bizarre...unless you live here in Puerto Rico.

So it starts out on a Sunday...picture this, Jeff and I having a day at the house where we aren't rushing off to a cave or to go diving...we are just talking in the kitchen. Then we see a car slow down. Then we hear a car door. Then the car starts moving. Then the car door opens and shuts again. We look out the window and go onto the porch to try to figure out what is going on. This car has passed our house by a couple car lengths. Our house on one side has a cluster of 6 or 8 houses we can see (where it is coming from), and on the other side nothing. We recognize the car. The ridge starts heading down and there is a big stretch of no houses and steep drop offs. This is where the car is headed.

Now the car is backing up and we hear the car door AGAIN. The car now takes off slowly and behind it is a little dog. Wonderful. Jeff is pretty pissed off so he gets the key, goes out into the road and goes after the slow moving car and dog that is running behind it. The driver stops as Jeff waves his arms and yells angrily. I go out and tell the driver "no tirando tu perro en frente mi casa...perros necesitan comer y armor. No estan basura." The guy continues with this start/stop routine and then starts doing a back up toward Jeff. Jeff manages to catch the dog which actually has a collar, looks clean, and he drops it into the car. The entire time the man says nothing in Spanish or English. He is like a zombie just starting and stopping the car and opening and closing the passenger door.

The car now goes forward, and then after a few minutes comes back up the hill and there isn't a dog running after it.

Fast forward another 15 minutes. We see the car again and it is coming to the gate. It stops, and a woman gets out. The driver is the dog guy. She speaks perfect English and explains what was going on.

So here is the "can't make it up" story. They are renting a house over in the house cluster while they build their own house. Their dog likes to escape. When they want to take the dog with them all they have to do is open the car door and the dog hops in and they can go where ever they want. Today the dog escaped and her husband was driving up and down the road opening and closing the door so it would hop in. They weren't dumping it (trust me there are hundreds of dogs dumped on the roads here) - they were trying to get it to go in to the car,

Makes perfect sense!

So recognizing that this probably does make sense to them, and that they seemed nice (except for the odd thing of the guy not responding or saying anything even though I made a decent attempt at Spanish - didn't even utter a "no no") - I did my best to apologize in Spanish to him and English to her and told them if we see the dog escape down the road we will return it to them. She said they "didn't want any trouble" and we told her we didn't want to see dogs or cats dropped off on the road to die. They don't like that either and understood how we jumped to the wrong conclusion. Mystery solved- they were just inviting the dog to take a car ride, of course!

3 comments:

Linda said...

you can't make that up. Funny that the guy didn't respond, but maybe he was startled and didn't know what to do. I'm still pissed about the lack of water in Puntas. I think I'll start a an email campaign.

Anonymous said...

That IS NOT the outcome I had pictured. I will keep this in mind next week as I watch the comings and goings of my neighbors! And Hey Linda, yep, I am hoping for water for the next month. Wil

Jeff and Katrina Kruse said...

And yet again there is another “dropped off” dog sitting at our gate. It’s really cute, friendly, and scared. We don’t mention all the cats that try to get in, that just comes with the territory.