Puerto Rico: Day 6 - Arecibo

We had big plans for our day driving out to Arecibo, which is more in the middle of Puerto Rico. Tim and I had gone to the Rio Camuy Cave Park and Arecibo Observatory the last time we were in PR and we thought the kids would really like it. Our plans started to unravel when I looked up the Cave Park online and found out that it wasn't open on Mondays or Tuesdays, so we would not be able to go there (guess I should have looked that up before our trip, but why wouldn't a tourist attraction be open most days in the summer??). It was okay though because I found a substitute place to visit, the Arecibo Lighthouse and History Park.

When we woke up on Monday, it was pouring. Just raining ridiculously hard. We decided to go anyway and just hope the rain wouldn't mess things up too much. We drove about an hour and decided to go to the Observatory first because it was just drizzling. It is the largest radio telescope in the world and is used by scientists from all over the world for research. It is also operated by Cornell University, which we thought was pretty neat. There is a visitor center with some information to look at and a short movie, both of which Cameron enjoyed. Leah also liked the movie because it was a cool, quiet and dark place for her to eat lunch!

This is the radio telescope. The dish at the bottom is around 18 acres! At the bottom right corner of the picture you can see Cameron's favorite part - the special shoes that the scientists have to use to walk on the dish. It is a big shoe that distributes their weight over a larger surface area.

The dome and other research equipment is held up by three giant towers.

Mama and Cam in front of the radio telescope.

Cam, Daddy and Leah. There were a lot of little lizards in the vegetation around the telescope and Cam loved to chase them.

Leah and Daddy

After we were done at the Observatory, we had some lunch and drove up to the Arecibo Lighthouse and History Park. When we got there, it was raining like crazy again. Since the park was almost all outside, we decided that it wasn't worth paying to go in. Instead, we did a couple of geocaches and headed back to San Juan. It was a bit of a bust, to drive an hour just to see one thing, but oh well! It ended up raining all night long, so when we got back to the hotel, we just had dinner, watched a movie and went to bed.

Puerto Rico: Day 5 - Travel Day

On Sunday, we moved from the condo to the hotel we would be at for the rest of our stay. In the morning, we walked around the town around our condo a bit more, got breakfast, and packed up. We got some lunch and drove to our hotel, the Courtyard Marriott Isla Verde. It was raining most of the evening, so we just got dinner and went to bed. Here are a bunch of pictures from the condo and our morning activities.

The view from our deck was AMAZING. This is looking to the left - you can see the big pool and the kiddie pool.

View straight out. There was a great breeze that came in off the ocean too.

And to the right.

Using the fisheye lens to capture the entire living room and a bit of the dining room. Leah is hanging out on her "playmat".

Walking around outside of the condo complex, the town was pretty neat. When we showed Matt these pictures, he said "Wow, that looks EXACTLY like Costa Rica".

The houses were so colorful.

This was a big open area in front of the surfing beach.

These are the two towers of our condo complex, Sandy Hills.

The bakery where we had meals on a couple of the mornings. Very good and very cheap - breakfast for all of us was $6 and that included our "expensive" drinks.

Cam after enjoying his usual breakfast, a donut covered with chocolate frosting! He made such a mess while he ate, but he really enjoyed himself.

The church in the plaza

The whole family in front of a Luquillo mosaic sign.

Cam with the mosaic turtle.

Cam in the foreground, our condo complex in the background.

This was the door to our condo. When we first got there, it kind of freaked us out because we thought it was bars on the door for security reasons. Turns out, the metal grate door is Latin America's version of a screen door. People from the other condos on our floor always had the wooden door open with the metal door shut, so air could get through but people couldn't just walk in. It was a bit odd and we usually kept both doors shut - to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out!

Puerto Rico: Day 4 - Luquillo Beach and Bio Bay

Here are a few more pictures from our condo. First, Cam and Mama getting ready for the beach in the living room.

And second, here is Leah on her make-shift playmat. We put one of the extra comforters on the ground so that she could lay on it and look around. She really liked it, especially when we put it right below the ceiling fan.

One of the main reasons we chose to stay in our condo is because it is located in the town of Luquillo, which has one of the best beaches in Puerto Rico. There is a beach right outside our condo, but it is pretty rough with big waves and riptides, so we can't go in too deep. On Saturday, we decided to go to Luquillo Beach. It was a really nice public beach with great sand, and shallow and warm water. We had a wonderful time there, digging in the sand and swimming in the water.

Cam and Daddy in the ocean. The beach is in a bay, so the water is very calm and the waves are gentle.

Leah got a chance to hang out on the beach. She couldn't really play in the sand but we had to take some pictures anyway!

Leah's first dip in ocean water. In fact, it was Leah's first dip in any water other than a bathtub!
Not bad, for her first swimming experience to be in the Atlantic Ocean off of Puerto Rico. That's my little world traveler! :)

Cam joined Mama and Leah in the water.

Mama and Leah head into the water for a bit more swimming. The water was so warm, it was easy for her to stay in for quite a while. She really liked it, kicking her feet and "splashing" a little bit.

After swimming for a while, we all got out of the water. Daddy and Cam made sand castles.

Then Cam smushed the sand castle!

Daddy had to repeat this process quite a few times - building up a castle so that Cam could step on it.

After stepping on a bunch of castles, Cam and Daddy got more creative and started using Cam's tummy to get the castles.

Happy boy in mid-destruction!

Daddy got tired of castles and got creative, making this sand turtle! Cam was very impressed.

But not so impressed that he saved it from destruction. The turtle got a belly flop smush!

The belly flop was not very successful and Cam ended up with a face-full of sand. This is one of his favorite parts of vacation to tell about, when he ate the sand.

We borrowed a beach tent from the Santaguidas and it worked out great. It gave us shade and was perfect to sit under for the couple of little rain spells that happened during the day.

After swimming, Leah hung out in the little tent in the shade.

There were lots of vendors with little push carts walking up and down the beach. They all had three big tub coolers on their carts, with each cooler filled with a different type of "ice cream". It wasn't exactly ice cream though, it was more like gelato in consistency. It was very good. We got passion fruit flavor and it was delicious.

"Please may I have a bite, Daddy?"

"Thank you!!"

Daddy and Mama also enjoyed it, it was a great treat for a warm day.

Sandy face boy. He was having so much fun playing in the sand, he didn't care that it was all over his face, hands and body.

Leah liked being in the little tent - she was all smiles!

What a cute girl!

View of the beach from our tent.

Daddy made a big pile of sand and made a hole in it for Cam to climb in. Then we put Cam's shoes on the pile like his feet were sticking out. Cam did not like that, nor did he like being in the hole. :-P

He climbed out pretty quickly.

There are less than ten bio-luminescent bays in the world, and Puerto Rico has three of them. Most visitors to PR go to the bio-bays in a kayak, but that wouldn't work for us because of the kids. We really wanted to go see the bio-bay, so I found a tour through Las Cabezas Nature Reserve that ended in the Fajardo Bio-Bay.

We waited for the tour near the Bahia Las Cabezas bay. It was just getting dark and the light was just beautiful.

There were tons of rocking chairs on the deck overlooking the bay. It was a nice place to wait for the tour to start.

We rode a little train throughout the nature center, making several stops. The first was at a beach, where we saw some of the animals in the reserve (crabs, frogs, lizards) and talked about light pollution and its effect on sea turtles. The second stop was at reserve's lighthouse. It was a beautiful old building.

A view from the lighthouse steps, overlooking the bay.

The last stop was the actual bio-luminescent bay. We walked on boardwalks through a mangrove forest, ending at Laguna Grande - the Fajardo bio-bay. It had been raining a ton the days before our tour, which dilutes the effects of the dinoflagellates, making the sparkling of the bio-bay a lot less exciting. We didn't take any pictures in the bio-bay because Cameron and Leah were both falling asleep at that point, so there were no arms left to take pictures! But Cam did like it, seeing the sparkling water when a stick was dragged through it.

It was another great day in Puerto Rico!