Making do, and merrily, with a full house

Luckily, my daughter Clare, 3, was able to slip through the house's doggie door, lift the two-by-four that served as a lock, and let us in.

This was the closest we came to disaster during our 10-day family vacation. Despite the beauty of this island just east of the Puerto Rican mainland, which was freed of more than a half-century of US Navy occupation in 2003 and is loaded with gorgeous, clean, deserted beaches, the trip should have been a wreck. Eleven of us were crammed into a four-bedroom house and the family as a whole - my in-laws, my wife, Nika, and our two kids, her brother, his wife and daughter, plus her other brother and his girlfriend - has a fanatic devotion to doing things together that often leaves us doing nothing fast. I figured we would never get out of the house on time.

And yet it worked. We resorted to a kind of socialism, subverting individual desires for the good of the collective. A division of labor took hold. We took turns with duties - chef, diaper-changer, butler, laundress, DJ, child-feeder, among others - and there were some superlative individual performances. Rob, a bartender, concocted pineapple- and guava-soaked rum drinks each night. Nika was a masterful child-distracter and Nina a great group motivator. When the kids grew tired of the hot sun on Playa Navio, a fine-sand beach backed by green foliage, their grandfather Nick built them a tepee out of fallen palm fronds. When the kids were done, I crawled in and enjoyed a half-hour nap.

Vieques is stunning; its people are hospitable; and the beaches on its southern shore justly renowned. The center of the island is green and just hilly enough to provide a view of the coast as you drive south. You reach the best beaches via dusty, pot-holed dirt roads, and each bumpy jaunt proved worthwhile: The beaches boast sand with a fine, nearly flour-like consistency, and the water was perfectly warm and clear.