Puerto Rico - Day 4

Day four was a really early morning wake-up to get to our half-day snorkeling adventure.  Another beautiful drive, this time up the eastern side of the island, to Fajardo.  The tour itself was so much fun.  Maybe 25 people on the boat, and the crew did a great job!  We first went to the reef for some snorkeling.  I was really worried that Mase would have trouble with snorkeling, but he jumped right in and was head-down the majority of the time.  We saw a ton of fish, plants, and coral!  They fed us a delicious lunch after snorkeling, and then took us over to Icacos Beach for some swimming.

Once we got to Icacos Beach, they opened up the bar (free local rum drinks!), inflated the water slide, and showed people the jumping platform.  Talk about a hit!  I stayed in the water for the whole two hours, just people watching and taking pic/videos of the family.  Definitely a workout treading water for that long, but it was the best time.

After we got back to mainland...is it still considered "mainland" if it's an island...we drove about 20 minutes to a town called Luquillo.  Luquillo is known for their food kiosks - think 60+ food trucks, but in brick and mortar format, like a strip mall.  SO.MUCH.FOOD.  The smells were incredible, the music and dancing were all local...like a big party!  We got some really good food, and I helped myself to a pina colada IN a pineapple.  It was spendy but so worth it.  More souvenir shops here, too, so we poked around for a little bit, and then made the drive back to the house.  

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.