Puerto Rico!

This post is long overdue, but is about the amazing time we spent in Puerto Rico!

Why Puerto Rico?

One cold November Saturday morning, the kind of November morning where there's not enough snow to have fun and it's too cold to do anything non-snow, I saw a yahoo article titled something like "5 places to go this winter when you're miserable" and they mentioned Puerto Rico.  When Melanie saw the article, she said she'd read about PR in several travel blogs and it was supposed to be awesome. After about 5 minutes of serious adult contemplation (or however long it took us to find tickets on kayak.com), we were all set!  Hooray for planning!  Then it was off to the bookstore to buy travel books, because A) I knew nothing about the place except for what I remembered from that song in West Side Story, not much, and B) A huge part of my enjoyment of travel is the anticipation and daydreaming and few things help you do that like reading travel books on your destination. Then we convinced our friends the Harts to come with us.

Fast forward two months...getting to Puerto Rico was a long process, having to basically cross North America and all.  We took a red eye from Salt Lake City to Orlando, hung out in the airport for 4 hours, tried to sleep, and were on our way to San Juan.  So far not so awesome, a sleepless night in an airplane followed by an airport.  Woot.  But as I lay dazing on the airplane, at some point I looked out the window and saw this:

That's what I'm talking about!

And I was officially excited for our Caribbean vacation.  We landed in San Juan where we were miraculously greeted by the Harts who had somehow made a 35 minute layover in JFK, met our awesome Airbnb host, Doris, and set off for Old San Juan, starving.

Orange juice lathe?  Yes, indeed!

Not for long!  It was Saturday night, and delicious food was everywhere.  After satisfying our lust for Pinchos (delicious meat on a stick) we set off on a self-guided walking tour.  And loooooovvvved every step of it. 

Awesome waterfront

"Streets of Gold!" I kept yelling like a goob.  Also, blue cobblestones!

San Juan was one of the first settlements in the New World, and Puerto Rico is basically the gate to the Caribbean, and as it was Spanish for it's first 400 years, is chock-full of awesome spanish-colonial architecture.

Harts! and architecture

I found a nice fixer-upper for sale on this awesome street.  I saw it as an opportunity, others may see it as an abandoned shell...

Ahh the Old City charm...and traffic patterns!  Happy to walk.

Needs no caption

Everywhere we walked we couldn't stop smiling and reveling in the charm of the place.  It was a perfect blend of Caribbean and Spanish.  Reminded us a lot of the vibe in Merida.  Eventually we made our way up the hill, where we were rewarded with this view from one of the forts (use the horizontal scrollbar).  It was a fine welcome to Puerto Rico!

Had to go huge!  Panoramas don't mesh with blogger, apparently. 

With no time to lose on our vacation, the next day we were off to the rainforest, the only tropical rain forest in the US national park system.  It was great and predictably rainy!

This was one of the "Banos d'Oro"  which made us chuckle until our friend Elise explained it meant "golden bath", not "golden toilet."  

Jungly!

More jungle pictures with friends:

Featured: Idahoans in their non-native habitat

From there we were off to the beach, then to our awesome hotel room, to wake up bright and early to begin island hopping!

Looks like a worthy - if small - craft! 

Smile, everyone!

 The check in was awesome - they took our tickets (no ID), weighed our bags, and then had us jump up on the baggage scale!  Nothing like being weighed in public!  Eventually they walk you out, put your bags in a tiny compartment in the back, and assign you seats based on weight.  My eagle-eyed readers will see from the picture above is instead of a romantic flight next to my wife (making a cameo behind the photo-bombing asian guy), I got to share a cozy bench with a roughly 6'4", 250 lb Coast Guardsman.  Which was too bad because we were flying over the Caribbean into the early morning sun, and it was beautiful.  C'est la vie.

The island of Culebra's Flamenco beach.

The local welcoming committee - airport chickens

The next few days were spend snorkeling, beach-bumming, and zipping around the tiny island on our rental golf-cart from beach to beach.  And yes, it was as awesome as that sounds.  And the food...

A fine end to a fine day of beach-bummery

But then we were off, to another island called Vieques.  A short flight later...

And we were on another Caribbean paradise!  This one was much larger, and has two towns.  All the nice beaches are on the southern coast, so that's where we and our rental jeep went.  More of the same ensued:

Swimming/snorkeling at this cool abandoned dock

Beaches - we went out to that island to snorkel and I saw a stingray!  He was probably 7 feet head to tail, and 4 feet across!

Caribbean Life

Love...

Black sand beach!

and of course food!

More love...we're the cutest!

Yes, I took this picture - me!

Vieques was different, due to it's size.  It has 40 beaches on an island the size of Manhattan, with 9000 people.  You could just drive to beach after beach until you found "your" perfect beach, and a crowded beach was more than 2 cars in the parking lot.  One of the quirks of Vieques is instead of wild chickens, there are semi-wild horses all over the island!  They just roam around, doing whatever they want, and from time to time (for fun?) the local teenagers will grab one and ride it around town, showing off.  But we discovered with wild horses there's a fine line between showing off and being completely out of control, as we saw one poor fellow get his leg smashed between horse and van- ouch!

credit - Abe's bio bay tours

One of the main things we wanted to do in Puerto Rico was visit the Bio-luminescent bays.  This is where you kayak out at night, and the water glows when it is disturbed due to microorganisms called dino-flagellates.  You can hit the side of you're kayak to scare the fish, and send them shooting off leaving glowing trails, like lightning in the water.  It was right up there for "coolest thing we've ever done", in all of our travels.  Since it takes place at night and only happens for a moment, it's extremely difficult to photograph, so take a look at this link for an idea of our experience.  Look at it!  We were there when there was almost no moon, by luck, and it would have been magical enough to kayak underneath the shining stars, but then to add the glowing water - mind-blowingly fantastic memory.

The Harts left 4 days before we did, and we went out sailing on a charter!  

Maxin, Relaxin.

It was a cool experience, we sailed around for a while, went snorkeling some more, and had lunch.  The neatest part for me was talking with the captain, Nate, a guy about our age.  He had a job in corporate finance in Boston, working his way up the corporate ladder, and went to Vieques on vacation.  While he was there he went on a sailing charter and asked the captain what it would take to start a charter operation.  Fortune was with him, the captain told him that after 20 years running charters he was ready to sell his boat and business, and within a week Nate bought it and moved down there!  He told us in his cubicle in Boston his screensaver was a beach; now that he lived in the Caribbean, he kept a picture of his cubicle in his boat!  I loved the story, and he was just an example to me of someone wanting a different life and then making it happen.  Everywhere we travel we meet people who had a vision and an idea of what matters most to them and then pursue it, and are now living the life of their dreams.  I always love meeting these people, they are an inspiration and reminder to me that life really is what you make it.

Another few days in the sun, and a return trip to San Juan to visit more of the old town, and we were ready to head home.

Overall it was a great vacation, and Puerto Rico was a great place to visit.  It was very culturally similar to Mexico, and a lot of fun to travel with friends.  We would recommend it to anyone, a fine slice of foreign country, right here in the ol' US of A.