Puerto Rico - Day 3

Day three was an adventure, of course!  We wanted to explore Old San Juan, and we knew it would be another drive to get back to the north part of the island.  The route GPS gave us, however, was not the same route we had taken from the airport.  This route took us way up into the mountains, on a very narrow, windy road.  Someone....Dana....had quite a few beers the night before, so the road got the best of him and we had to pull over.  He blamed it on the beer - I was just happy to have the "hurl girl" label off of me for once!  The views were beautiful.  We stopped to see a small part of Lake Patillas - we saw just a small portion.  The map showed it as a huge reservoir with a dam.

We eventually made it to Old San Juan, along with thousands of other people.  San Juan has way more people than I thought, PLUS there was a cruise in port.  Poor researching on my part, but we made the best of it.  Finding parking was a struggle, but we eventually found a spot in a parking garage (that was full within minutes of us entering) that was close to where we wanted to explore.  We walked the streets, found some street vendors, and made our way to San Cristobal Castle.  This was so fun to learn about and explore.  We spent about an hour there.  There is another castle right across the bay, but the window for kids to be "excited" about historical things is quite small.  We instead opted to explore a bit more and found a great place for lunch.  Right outside the restaurant was a guy with a monkey and some beautiful birds, so we paid to have the kids hold the birds for some pictures.  Then we hit some more street vendors and souvenir shops.  The kids were wanting to go back to the beach, so we told them we needed to hit the road ASAP since we had a drive ahead of us.

We made our way back to Playa el Faro de Arroyo for more swimming, this time with the boogie board!  It was later in the day when we got there, so the waves were a little more aggressive.  And then Randy got stung by a jellyfish.  He felt this hot/burning sensation on his arm, so he raised it out of the water and peeled off what looked like a translucent spaghetti noodle.  We looked it up, and even if a jellyfish loses one of its tentacles, it is still venomous.  Yowza!

We found a great restaurant with outdoor seating for dinner - Hecho en Casa.  The food was so good!  There were two wild dogs roaming around, begging for food.  The kids took pity and kept slipping the dogs some table food, and tried to talk us into taking the dogs with us.  

Puerto Rico - Days 1 and 2

We decided last fall that we wanted to take a trip to Puerto Rico, and planning vacations is pretty much my favorite thing to do.  We have two in the works right now, with a couple of others on the "list".  My life just feels empty without a travel adventure on the horizon.  Puerto Rico has been hit with a couple hurricanes in the recent years, so we were trying to find an area that had mostly recovered.  We knew we didn't want to be in/around San Juan (read as:  off the beaten path; also read as:  get us away from the people), so we explored a couple of different, smaller towns and settled on Patillas.  It's on the southeastern-ish part of the island, very quiet (except for those damn roosters).  We found an amazing Air bnb, a house with a great outdoor pool area, and immediately booked it.  It was such a great place, nestled between two jungle mountains, with a straight-on view of the ocean.

We had a long day of flights getting there, followed by getting our rental car (minivan for all seven of us), stopping at a grocery store for food/snacks for the house, and then an hour+ drive down to Patillas.  Everyone was exhausted by the time we got settled, so that was the end of day one.

Day two was Randy's birthday.  We had a great breakfast at the house and decided to find some local beaches for a beach/swim day.  The first beach was Villa Pesquera Beach of Patillas.  This was definitely a family beach visited by locals.  There were numerous families there having BBQs.  There was quite a bit of seaweed, so the kids quickly decided they wanted to find a different beach.  While we were there, however, there was an ice cream truck that came through, so we all grabbed ice cream and sang Happy Birthday to Randy before heading out to find another beach.

  

The second beach we found was Playa el Faro de Arroyo, and was much better.  No seaweed in the water and hardly anyone else on the beach.  There are wild dogs all around the island, so a few made there way over to explore/pee on the minivan tires, and then laid underneath it for shade.  We were able to walk out into the water quite a ways, riding the waves. The kids decided we needed a boogie board, so we were able to go grab one from a nearby store to use another day.

After all of the beach fun we could handle, we decided to head back to the house for the remainder of the day/evening.  The kids, of course, immediately jumped into the pool.  We had homemade quesadillas for dinner, and set up three different phones to watch some baseball games.  The outdoor pool/patio area was top notch, and we spent quite a bit of time out there.  There were a couple horses on the property behind us, so we made a point to visit them often and give them snacks (one looked a little skinny).

Last Day of School

Well, here we are, at the end of another school year. Time sure is a thief! Both kids did really well this school year - lots of growth for them personally and academically. Kendall will be going into high school and Carter will be going into his senior year!

Kendall's first day of middle school and last day of middle school.

Both kids:  first day of school this year, and last day of school.

Carter's first day of school this year, and last day.

Par for the Course

 Kendall's very last band concert was really cool. The 8th graders definitely put on a show with some great music! This, however, was the best we got with pictures. Seems about right!