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.