Puerto Rico: Day 7/8 - Swimming!

Here is a photo of Cam, fast asleep in the big bed. The morning at El Morro and Old San Juan really wore him out!


After naptime, the rain had stopped and it was very warm. We decided to head out and go swimming before it started raining again. Here is Leah in her other very cute bathing suit!

Mama and Leah went for a swim. The water was so warm that Leah could stay in for a quite a while. She really liked it.

Oh wait, we have one other family picture from our trip! Here we are in front of the pool.

The next day was the day we were leaving, but our flight didn't leave until 3:30 in the afternoon, so we had all morning to hang out. First we went down to the beach, where Cam spent a lot of time playing in the sand and we all went for a swim. It wasn't anywhere as nice as Luquillo beach, but the ocean was warm and Cam had fun in the sand. The picture below is a bit foggy; our camera didn't like the muggy weather and we got a lot of foggy pictures!

Looking down the beach at Isla Verde.

We went back into the pool after being on the beach for a bit. Daddy and Cam went for a swim.

Then Leah had a turn swimming with Daddy.

Daddy with both kids!

There was a kid's pool that had a water slide into it. Cameron was tentative at first, but once he went down it and figured out how fun it was, he wanted to go down again and again.

He didn't even mind going under water when he got to the end of the slide.

Around noon we went back to the hotel room and packed up our stuff. We had an easy rental car drop off and check in at the airport, and the first flight wasn't bad at all. Cameron watched a movie and took a nap, and Leah was a very good girl. When we got to Atlanta, we found out that our second flight was delayed. It was already a late flight so we were nervous about how the kids would be. Luckily, we found a quiet spot to sit in near our gate and hung out waiting for our plane to leave. Leah liked lying on the chair and looking around.

Cam wasn't shy about sprawling out to play with the "Game Phone" (aka Tim's iPod Touch). He also had fun chatting with random people, all of whom thought it was very charming.

We finally got home around midnight that night, but both kids were fantastic despite the late night. We already knew that Cam was a great traveler, so it was wonderful to see that Leah is too. This will be the first of many family trips, and it was a great one!!

Puerto Rico: Day 7 - El Morro

And now, back to your regularly scheduled Puerto Rico updates!! On Tuesday we woke up and it was rainy and yucky. It was our last full day in PR though, so we decided to just head out and do what we could in the rain. Our plan for the day was to go to Fort San Felipe del Morro, also known as El Morro. It is a fortress on the tip of San Juan and was put there to protect the city and the entrance to the bay.

We drove into San Juan and luckily Tim remembered a parking garage that we had parked in the last time we were there. It was right near El Morro, and although it reeked of urine, it was very convenient. When we had parked and gotten out of the car, we found that the rain had stopped. It ended up threatening rain all day, but didn't do any more than just sprinkle. We were very lucky!

Cam in front of the large lawn, with El Morro in the background.

There was a long walkway up to the entrance. Cam rode on the front of the stroller and it worked out very well.

Looking back at Old San Juan from the entrance of El Morro

This picture isn't anything exciting, but I had to include it so that we could remember a story. The bridge in the foreground was over the moat. What made it so "special" was that it was FILLED with these little tiny no-see-em bugs. Millions of these nasty little bugs filled the whole space, and when we walked through it, we got absolutely COVERED in the bugs. They were in our clothes, hair, face, everywhere. It was so nasty and disgusting, but very memorable.

The first thing we did was climbed up to the top floor of the fort and looked around. Cam loved these cannon balls and spent a bunch of time examining them.

The entire top of the fort was rimmed with these little tunnel steps (we have no idea what they are) and Cam had a blast climbing through every tunnel.

Peek-a-boo!!

Cameron would ask "May me go through?" before he went through each tunnel.

Looking out at Old San Juan

You have to love places that you can climb all over - Cam sure does!

Cam and Daddy at the lighthouse.

Cam and Daddy in one of the "little houses" (as Cam called them)

I love this shot of Cam running out of the little house.

Another shot of Old San Juan and the coastline.

Leah hanging out

Cameron loved going in every little hidey-hole he could find. This one was in a kitchen, so I told him that I thought it was an oven. He got very upset about it (hence the face in this picture) and got out right away.

The lower levels of the fort were not stroller friendly so Leah rode around in Mama's wrap.

These are cannon tracks, used to move the cannon back and forth to aim it. We explained this to Cameron, but he decided they were railroad tracks. He had so much fun running on the tracks, and was very good about following the curve and not getting off the track.

Mama and Leah took their turn in another little house.

A family picture, finally! I think this is the only picture of all four of us together from our trip.

Cameron on a cannon.

This is how Leah ended her visit to El Morro. I guess she isn't a big history fan yet.

After the fort, we headed into Old San Juan for lunch. We had lunch at a very yummy restaurant, but Cam was really hitting the wall at the end of the meal, so we headed back to the hotel for naptime. Pictures from the evening and the last day are coming up soon...

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!