Puerto Rico, Saturday-Sunday, 5-6 February 2005

We left our home on a flight to Anchorage at 9:50 pm on Thursday, February 3rd, to catch a flight out at 12:50 am.  Our flight stopped in Seattle and then we changed planes in Houston before arriving in San Juan at 8:00 pm on Friday the 4th.  We rented a car and went right to the Beach Buoy Inn in the Ocean Park section of San Juan.  This was a "budget" family inn and looked like it, with minimal amenities.  But we had a wonderful young woman who checked us in and then waited on us at breakfast in the morning who really "made it" for us!  She was very sweet and helpful, visiting with us and answering our touristy questions with patience and grace.  We ate in a small open-air patio.  It had a very small pool with a waterfall and there were small lizards scampering and sunning on the walls and trees.
 

After a good night's sleep and a yummy breakfast of several kinds of toast and fruit, we went shopping for some summer clothes on Saturday.  After lunch, we walked around Old San Juan, the oldest part of the city.  We began with a tour of El Morro, an old Spanish Fort dating from the 1500's.
   

The streets of Old San Juan are charming, the homes and shops all in a row, brightly painted and with canopies and/or lacy balcony rails.  The streets are blue cobblestone, made from iron ballast from the Spanish ships.  Lanny bought a Panama hat, which you will see in pictures on other pages.  We ate dinner in another open-air restaurant, listening to the coqui as dusk fell.  (The coqui is the tiny tree frog that Puerto Rico is famous for - you can hear a sound file here.)
  

Sunday, we went to El Yunque, the massive rain forest known to the Park Service as the Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical forest in the United Stated National Forest System.
       

Near the rain forest is a popular public beach with wide white sand, palm trees, and bathhouses called Luquillo Beach:
   

Near Luquillo Beach was a long long of food kiosks (numbered up to 65!) by the side of the road, where we stopped for lunch.  It seemed to be mostly fried food, and most of the vendors did not speak English.  We tried flat rounds of fried cod (very greasy and chewy) and fried plantain.  Plantain is similar to banana, but must be cooked to be eaten.  It is starchy rather than sweet, and these fried plantain were most similar to French fries.  We also tried flour tortillas that were wrapped around meat (chicken, in this case) and fried.  These were pretty good.  I also got something that I did not expect to like, but it looked interesting.  A banana was sliced partway through the length and opened, as you would a baked potato.  It was cooked somehow at some point in the process (baked?) and into this slit was a strip of meat similar to mild taco meat.  Several narrow strips of cheese (American?) were laid across the top, and it was served warm.  It was actually pretty good, though very different from anything I have ever had before.

After lunch, we drove back to the airport to return the car and take a cab to the cruise ship.  Looking back on San Juan from the ship: