Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - coffee table book

Oh, this opens up all kinds of possibilities. I assume since you use the phrase"Destination wedding" that the couple resides on the mainland US or basically not on PR?

Will you be in attendance? If so, maybe the best thing you could do for her would be to take lots of candid shots of the wedding, the party, the reception, the guests, the hotel, the town, you name it--and then put it all together in a nice photo album for her. Even if she and her fiance hire a wedding photographer, it will more likely be formal shots and I'd bet that they would love photos from a more casual point of view. (At least, when my husband and I got married in the Caribbean a few years ago, we loved receiving photo album from guests who saw and did things that we were too busy to catch.)

A nice coffee table book is a good idea, but in my experience, coffee table books are full of beautiful pictures but not particularly interesting photographs. Does that distinction make sense to you? I don't mean to suggest that a good photography book on PR doesn't exist, but it might take a little more digging than just finding a nice coffee table book.

Are your friends animal lovers? If so, you might consider making a donation to the SATO rescue dog program. This is a program that rescues dogs all over PR and tries to place them in permanent homes in the US. It's a really good program and there are at least two posters on this forum who know the joys of adopting a SATO dog.

You could arrange with the place that your friends are staying and provide them with a couples' massage or special sunset sail.

You could also do a welcome home package that includes Puerto Rican music, books, food, rum, etc. Or save that and do it for an anniversary present next year.

I've got my first trip planned to Puerto Rico and Vieques in May and I just finished reading Esmeralda Santiago's lovely memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican. Perhaps a nice hardback copy or a signed first edition of it would be a nice gift.