So while I’ve been recommending the resort to people verbally, I wanted to take a moment to write down what I learned vacationing there, and what people might want to know before they take my advice and book their own trip:

• Having a nanny while you are on vacation, as I mentioned on Twitter, is amazing. Compared to my week in Puerto Rico last year with the baby, this was total relaxation. I had exactly as much toddler time as I wanted. And I was lying in the hammock, and Patrick wanted to play basketball, Carlene our nanny was happy to take him, and I could go with them or catch up later. I was able to do my own things, like trying out scuba diving, without having to negotiate childcare with my wife.
• The resort is wonderful, for what it is. It is locally owned, and definitely not maintained to Disney standards. They stay on top of maintenance, but there is still chipped paint to be found, overgrown plants in places, and parts of the pool deck collect water. But the price is good, the staff members are wonderful, and I didn’t have any facility problems that actually impacted my vacation.
• If you want to spend time with your kids, you have to be really clear with the nannies. Their default mode is to whisk the kids off into kid-oriented parts of the resort, where there are lots of activities, lots of other kids, and other nannies to socialize and share duties with. Our son was a bit sick, and tended to be clingy. But whenever he wanted to head off to the playground, our nanny Carlene was happy to take him. By day three we realized we were missing him. But it took a couple of conversations to get to the right balance of Patrick-directed, Carlene-directed, and parent-directed activities.
• “Gratuity included” is only technically true. While the prices and the organizations is gratuity included, many of your fellow resort-goers, particularly the repeat customers, will be ignoring this rule. Tips are not large, mostly one dollar US or one hundred Jamaican (which is about $1.20), but they help to get you priority service at the bar and at breakfast. If the resort had been more crowded, they might have been more necessary.
• Nannies are happy to stay late, but you won’t get a lot of guidance from the hotel management. Based on conversations with our nanny and others at the resort, a large fraction of their income comes from overtime when you hire them after 5pm for additional childcare at $6/hour. We converged on having Carlene take a break and come back at 6:30 for a few hours while we went to dinner. Tips are also big for them, it seemed standard to tip the nanny $100 for the week if you were happy.

The resort wasn’t without a few opportunities for improvement:

• The food isn’t very good. This may be par for mid-range all-inclusive resorts. The menu gets a bit repetitive, and in particular the deserts were downright poorly executed. Also, presumably because it was a light week, only 2 of the 3 restaurants were open on any given night. On the bright side, this probably helped me avoid gaining weight, and the breakfasts were reasonably good.
• Some parts of the facility aren’t as child-safe as I would like. Part of this is Jamaica’s more relaxed building codes, and part of it is that kids are pretty much always being watched, so they don’t have much opportunity to get into trouble. But, for example, the railing between the pier and the ocean had big gapes, definitely not up to US code. And the cribs they provided were not SIDS safe. If you are a parent who is especially concerned about these things, it could be quite frustrating.
• It could be crowded. We were there the slowest week of the year. If all the rooms were full, I expect the deck chairs around the pool and other facilities could be more taxed. It’s something I’ll keep an eye on when booking our next trip.
• They are not helpful with arranging off-property trips unless the trip is run by one of their partners. This means that if you are interested in walking ten minutes down the road to the town center in Runaway Bay, and want advice for a place to eat, you won’t get any answers from the staff. Of course, Jamaica is a high crime island, so maybe you are best off staying on the resort. But if you want to catch a cab or their shuttle bus to do some shopping at a tourist-friendly Jamaican mall, expect to be taken advantage of unless you haggle the price and set things up in advance. Just because the resort booked your trip doesn’t mean you will get a good price or good service.

Of course I’m still very positive about the resort, and if you have young kids and are looking for a relaxing vacation I highly recommend it.

I hope you find what I wrote here useful. Especially if you are booking a trip to the FDR, leave a comment to let me know. Thanks.

Unfortunately the experience was less than wonderful. Latency was about double that of EVDO, averaging 450 milliseconds with spikes to 2-3 seconds. That meant that ssh connections were difficult to type across and web browsing had a distinctly 20th century feel to it. I wasn’t able to analyze throughput because I couldn’t get most of my web-based tools to load. Suffice to say throughput was disappointing.

I did some tracerouting and analysis, and I think a lot of the problems are in the first hop. First hop latency averaged 200 milliseconds. I’m pretty sure that first hope was on the train, and means that the local 802.11 network is overloaded. I wonder what level of provisioning they planned for. Looking around on Acela it seems like well over 50% of passengers are using laptops, which is a lot of laptops together in a thin metal tube.

The second hop hits a variety of different IPs, which might relate to some kind of multiplexed EVDO connection. These are internal non-routable IPs. The first public IP comes at the third hop, and is a router on HopOne.net in their Washington, DC area data center. I suspect the second half of the bad latency comes in this WWAN connection and the routing of the messages to DC. I’m not sure how it could be done better, but one imagines it could route directly to one of the national wireless networks. The MBTA commuter rail does this with AT&T, as I understand it.

So overall, I’m glad Amtrak has implemented WiFi, and now that it’s here I hope they improve it to make it usable. I fear they will just start charging to cut down on the overload. But it would be better for the world if they do not, and simply socialize the cost over all passengers. It won’t be long before 100% of passengers have some kind of WiFi device.

It started with a quest. On our way to Arecibo we had seen this strange structure off in the distance, and been unable to identify what it might be. Even when we got up close, it was unclear what was going on. The possibly-associated giant stone cross only increased our curiosity.

Looking at it in Google maps we were able to identify it as part of Space Rocket Plaza, which turns out to be part of Parque de las Ciencias. Some kind of science museum in suburban San Juan? That sounds like a good combination of local culture and nerd tourism, just right for Aletta and I. And maybe there will be baby oriented things for Patrick.

When we got there, the entire facility was bizarrely deserted. We arrived 45 minutes after the park opened, and as far as we could tell we were the only guests. The parking lot was empty and there was no one around. The first three facilities we went to (planetarium, railroads, and something else) were closed for repairs. The only people we saw were involved in cleaning and maintenance of the park, mostly powerwash. As we walked further and further in we became more convinced that the park was closed or somehow shut down.

The zoo didn’t seem to be entirely empty, but was kind of strange. I don’t know what kind of zoo puts deer, peacock, and chickens in the same cage. The selection of animals was at best strange. Little did we know that it was only getting started.

The first indoor museum that was actually open turned out to be the collection of some local big game hunter. Like the zoo, there was little to no information about what we were looking at.

The most bizarre part of the park was what initially appeared to be a model town. However, it was really unclear what it was trying to model. To make the puzzle more challenging, many of the buildings had evidently had their artifacts removed.

Others contained the most bizarre displays:

Eventually we realized this “town” was a kind of museum of classic Puerto Rican television comedy. Coming in with no cultural awareness, it was definitely quite weird. I would have been interested to learn more, but of course there was no signage in English or Spanish.

The pinnacle of our Parque de las Ciencias experience was the Museo del Telefono

This museum seems to be the result of a compulsive collector who was forced to clear out his garage after some kind of family intervention. There are piles of telephone equipment, from every vintage and at every level of repair.

None of it carries any information. For example, here is a lovely pile of mobile phones. The only sign? “No Tocar” (do not touch).

Imagine the thrill of finding the first descriptive sign in English in the whole park, here in the telephone museum!

Unfortunately the sign was sitting on top of this machine, which I can only hope is so much more than a touch tone phone:

Really, that was the telephone museum. And the whole park went like this. The transportation museum, which was a barn full of old cars (and one steam engine and one lunar lander). The archeological museum, which was a random assortment of mostly undocumented bones and bits of pottery. The aero/astro museum, which was a collection of posters from space and telescope magazine, an assortment of NASA paraphernalia, and a collection of model spaceships, some real, some fictional. There are photos, but you get the idea. Actually, there is one I have to share, from a sizable anex to the air and space museum:

Yes, completing the experience of a whole series of museums that could have been eclectic personal collections, here we have the section of the air and space museum dedicated to stamp collecting.

One bright spot was the art museum. The signage and interpretation was still nonexistant, but the museum contained some quality art by mostly Puerto Rican artists, and it was nicely put together. Of course, no comparison to Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, which we visited later in the trip.

As for Space Rocket Plaza, well, they did have some legitimate space rockets. Looks like leftovers from early NASA. Of course, in keeping with the rest of the facility, no signs or details to let me know the history of these pieces. But hey, they are rockets.

Of course the flight simulator is out of service, as it apparently has been for quite a while according to internet reviews. And the observation deck that originally attracted us to the park? Well, the road up to it from inside the park was closed. That left the elevator, on the other side of the parking lot. On our way towards its base we encountered a motley crew of park employees. None of the uniformed ticket takers or guides would admit to understanding our question about access, but one of the workmen with them offered to interpret. The question and it’s reponse was more challenging than I would have expected. Eventually we got “It’s closed” … “It’s closed, like for a wedding.” Alright, I suppose. Though 10am on a Wednesday seemed somewhat unlikely. Will it be open tomorrow, we asked. This lead to another spate of discussion, where our interpreter seemed as confused as we. “No, it is not open to public, permanently,” he eventually related.