Puerto Rico - Day 1

Day one was mostly getting here. I was more than a little nervous about flying over the ocean. The ocean is full of shark and other animals that want to eat people. I saw a lot of white specks in the ocean that didn't fade away like I would think white caps would. I can only assume that those white specks were sharks trying to eat me. What else could they be? We did fly over an island, which was kinda cool. I don't know what island it was, so don't ask.

When we were close, the pilot made an announcement. It was at the point that I thought, "It's such a tiny island. What if he misses?" And then there was all the tipping. Then we were getting closer and closer to the water. I was very sick at my stomach. I was very happy when we landed.

After we got our car (which had a hand crank for the windows), we drove around. We were not sure if we needed to wait for Blake or not. We didn't. So we decide to go to the rain forest, El Yunque.

The rain forest is amazing! First stop was Coca Falls. The street goes over this waterfall. Very pretty. The man on the rocks should have been a indication of things to come. He was so proud of himself. When he got the rock that was climbing for, he stood Capt. Morgan style and said "Take my picture!"

The next stop was the the Big Tree Trail which takes you to La Mina Falls. We had a hard time finding a place to park because this is where everybody was. There are little pavilions off this trail and all of them had a huge group grilling something. All kinds of parties. (I took this picture on the way back, after the parties were over.) The trail was very nice, but very narrow. It's a concrete trail that is about 1 1/2 - 3 feet wide. We often had to step off the trail to let people pass. The narrow trail was nice, because everything was close. The trail went along a river (I'm sure it has a name, but I don't know what it is.) that had a bunch of little pools. Most of the pools had people swimming in them. Looked like a nice place to relax. It did rain while we were walking on this trail. Imagine that, raining in a rain forest.

Finally, we made it to La Mina Falls. Jason on got hit with one branch. It didn't really hurt him, but it did fling a lot of ants on him. He didn't realize he had ants crawling all over him until about 10 minutes later. He thought the mosquitoes were biting him, but it was the ants. There were no mosquitoes.

La Mina Falls is where most of the swimming took place. Everyone was having a great time. There were even some people picnicking in the water. Looked like fun. We wished we had on our swimsuits. After we left the falls, we had a short .8 km hike all uphill to the trailhead and then another .1 km walk to our car, also uphill.

Third stop was a tower. I can't remember the name of the tower. We could have walked to the top for more dramatic views, but it was 5:45 and the gates closed at 6. We didn't want to get trapped inside the rain forest.

After that, we left. The traffic back was horrible. We did see some interesting things like a man riding a horse and talking on a cell phone.

After we check into the hotel, we went looking for a place to eat. We ended up at Yerba Buena Cafe. Very good food. I had beef and yuca. Jason had chicken and yuca. We will eat there again.

After dinner, we walked around a bit, went to Walgreen's, got a ride back to the hotel from Jeff, a guy Jason works with. We went to the casino for a little bit, but the slots were not paying out enough and we lost our money too quickly.