My day started out with me tweaking my back pretty much just walking across the room after my shower. SERIOUSLY?! I hadn’t brought any great pain drugs so I sent out a text to see if anyone had anything that would be worthwhile for me. A friend did have something I’ve taken in the past so tried that. I was really afraid that I’d have to cancel our zipline adventure the next day so wanted to do my best to make sure that didn’t happen.
The plan for today was walking around San Juan with our good friend Eddy as our fearless leader. He grew up in Puerto Rico but has obviously been gone for a long time. As we were getting off the ship it started pouring so we were all pretty much soaked by the time we got off the pier. Ugh. Fortunately the rain stopped pretty quickly and we dried out as we walked around town.
The sights were cool, too. Just look at the colorful buildings and blue cobblestones! (Do you know about the cobblestones?
The blue cobblestones that originally paved the streets of all of Old San Juan are now being replaced with new ones. The original cobblestones (adoquines in Spanish) were cast from iron slag, which is the waste from iron smelting. They were brought as ballast in the bottoms of European merchant ships in the 1800s.
Our first stop was a coffee house (none for me, thanks—but I did share in the small desserts we got)…
And then a chocolate restaurant to get churros…and more coffee.
Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention to how hot my hot chocolate was and burned my throat (I swallowed out of habit instead of spitting it out). So my throat hurt the rest of the day. My back was doing okay and I could walk but it certainly didn’t feel 100%.
By now the sun was coming out and it was getting hot and humid. Our group walked around one of the local forts (bonus score—free admission for military!) and then through town and some of the shops.
We thought it was hilarious that there was a Skittles van at the fort. Skittles is the nickname of our good friend who was basically in charge of setting up the whole cruise for our group. He wasn’t with us, but we had to take a picture!
Historical things aren’t really my cup of tea, but some of the things were neat and the views were gorgeous.
Another area we walked through is one that was ravaged by the recent hurricanes. I liked the sign: temporally. 🙂
You can see the scaffolding along the wall.
It was terribly crowded and crazy once we got back to the downtown area—one of the things I don’t like about visiting ports with 5000 of our fellow shipmates. You can get a small idea from this pic of the Umbrella Sky Project.
Both ships in port, which is why it was SOOOO crazy in town!
Our group split up at this point and we all did something different for lunch. We ended up with Eddy and Susan at a local diner for some quick Cuban sandwiches and then we made our way back to the ship where we relaxed on our balcony while waiting to set sail again!
Then Tom napped and I went to the bar to cool my throat with my yummy drinks. This was my view pretty much every time I was at The Schooner.
I visited with some friends who were also at the bar and eventually went up to the room to start getting ready for formal night in the dining room. Tom wore his dress blues again and we tried to recreate our formal night pic from 10 years ago but I know we didn’t accomplish it (for starters, my hair was curly, I didn’t have a red dress, and I had sunburn on my chest).
We also stopped by the bar (yet again!) to waste some time before dinner.
Ti, our favoritest bartender, said he wanted a picture of Tom without me since he was in uniform and I said that was fine because I wanted a picture of him without Tom. 🙂
Pics taken at dinner…one from a friend and one the professional ship photographer. 🙂
And then a few pics of Tom with our tablemates—we’ve known them forever and lived by Josiah and Leslie in DC for years, but they’d never seen Tom in dress blues in person so they wanted pics!
After dinner we took another professional photo with friends…and it turned out really good!!
Then went and changed clothes and went to our bar (Schooner!) and ended up paying Uno with a small group for an hour or so. It sounds ridiculous but it was really quite fun! We called it a night about 9:45 and we’re in bed with lights out by 10:30. It’s exhausting being on vacation!!
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