It occurs to me that I never wrote up a review of Culebra 2: Culebric Cugaloo. Backstory is I didn’t really want to spend the money on going to Puerto Rico/Culebra again because well, I don’t really care for beaches (beaches ain’t shit). But as all of my GORUCK adventures go, I got drunk and booked a flight there and would figure out the rest later. That wasn’t as exciting as it sounded. I’ve got some friends who live on the island and one of my friends was already staying in a villa so I self-invited to all of those accomodations. I fly to PR, get to a restaurant to drink beer and eat mediocre mofongo and wait for Dan to pick me up. In the interim, another friend is passing through and meets up for a drink.
Dan picks me up and I think we go to the airport to get Ben, Cristina and Jillian and eventually make it back to Dan’s nice house. We (I) start drinking all the beers and meet up some new friends throughout the night. Then we play Cards Against Humanity and I learn (again) that I am not funny. Rather, my friends have a dumb sense of humor because fuck them I’m funny as shit.
Eventually we all go to bed and I wake up to see a stranger in the house and I’m all “eh, fuck it it’s not my house” and then go back to sleep. Dan later remarks that I have a different lifestyle if I can wake up, see a strange white man in the house, ignore it and go back to sleep. I wake up again but this time there is a freaking cat sitting on my head. Luckily I’m under the covers but still allergic to cats. We eventually load up our gear and head to the local airport to fly over to Culebra but since we’ve got a few hours we went to eat at the best breakfast place in Puerto Rico and never want to leave. All we want to do is eat cheap food and not move but my friends, being the jerks that they are, make us get up and leave. We ended up exploring the area around the airport find some really cool graffiti in an abandoned warehouse. I like to imagine it as an abandoned meth den but nothing that exciting actually happens in my life (I’m ok with that).
We land in Culebra and I have to rent a golf cart. I did not spring for the $15/day insurance and I proceeded to freak the hell out when I wasn’t driving the golf cart later. Next time, I might get the insurance (not needed this trip) for the peace of mind. Since we’re on vacation, we end up at a bar and then I wait for Jason to land so I can crash at his place. I don’t actually remember what happens next but we wake up Saturday and I have a hangover and have to get ready for the Challenge. I load up my sandbag and stuff it into my ruck and we scoot on over there. For some reason I get to be Team Lead (TL) and I guide us over to where we were to start the Challenge (next door to our villa).
Like all of Bert’s Challenges, we start out with a PT test (2 minutes of pushups, 2 minutes of situps, 2 mile run) and I proceed to fail all of those. Got some cool pictures though. After that’s done, we climb through/under some fences and head to some closed beaches (they found some unexploded ordnance they needed to explode later) to do some snorkeling. I’m a terrible swimmer and nearly drowned (not really, just freaked out and had to get out of the water last year) last time so I chose to stay in the shallow end of the water. Our goal as a team was to snorkel and find a buried sandbag so people were swimming way out there and I could still walk around. My friend Nico was my swim buddy and she got stung by a fire coral and she had to get out of the water and I was pretty stoked about it since I didn’t have to be in the water anymore. The team doesn’t find it and it turns out that the sandbag was like 15′ from the shore so we owed exercises. Eventually we head back to the start point and load up in our golf carts and jeeps and head across the island.
Culebra is a hilly ass island and I was telling everyone it’s probably hillier than San Francisco (I’m probably wrong like with most things I’m sure about). Also, my golf cart was dumb and wouldn’t go faster than like 20 mph downhill so I was getting passed by all the people. At any rate, it’s like a 30 minute drive to the other side of the island to get to Xoni beach and that wasn’t bad but last year we walked the sumbitch and it took us like 4 hours (and I gave up my ruck like a bitch) and I was sad we didn’t have the carts last year. We did lots of water PT then got back in the carts for the drive back to the start point.
We get back to the start point and it’s around 8:00 PM and pitch black out. People get to talking and someone suggests ending the Challenge right then and there and Bert’s like “It’s your class you can do what you want” so we took a vote on it. All the GRTs were OK with ending it early but since we had some noobs in there we asked them if they wanted to continue. They were all fine with ending it but since the island shuts down early, we wouldn’t have had time to clean up and make it to a restaurant to get food so Josh went into town to get some pizzas for us and in the interim, we had our Welcome Party which was just PT in the water and on the sand and lots of cheating by everyone when we had to low crawl up the beach. Eventually Josh gets back with the Pizza and we get patched.
It was definitely one of the most fun Challenges and definitely had the best scenery. Like most GORUCK events, you end up meeting some really cool people and get to find out more things about yourself (or affirm them – I still don’t like sand!).
The Light the next day was cool and I drank all the beers and Crown and lost that patch and lost my shit when Dez caught the ball but didn’t.
tl:dr; fun challenge, fun light, great people