Belated Puerto Rico Update! – The Reluctant Grownup

I had a business trip to Puerto Rico for a week in March, and my sister came along. Our hotel, the El San Juan, was right on the beach. Really perfect.

Old world glamour
View out our door – straight onto the pool
A+ in sun protection
Take me to the pool!

I arrived midday on Fat Tuesday and checked in, then got unpacked. The room was on the ground level in a separate, one story building that ran along the poolside. We shared a king bed, and our shower was an open, doorless, tiled room a few steps down from the toilet (with no lid). The bathroom had a glass roof – and half the time, dudes were up there cleaning the roof. There was lots of cleaning the outdoor areas at this hotel – it was a running joke. Anyway, this sounds like a complaint, but it’s not – it was quite a nice place, even if you showered in a fishbowl.

Every night, we would hear a “co-QUI, co-QUI” sound. I presumed it was a bird, and we really did need a white noise app to be able to sleep. We discovered later, from a talkative taxi driver, that the sound is a small frog called the Coqui, out wooing lady frogs with its highly annoying call.

I had a cocktail event for my conference on the first night, and while it was lovely and I met a lot of people, I also failed to put on bug spray and I got absolutely obliterated by mosquitoes. I react pretty spectacularly to mosquito bites, and my legs were bright red and swollen, warm and hard (that’s what she said!) for the rest of the trip. After my bug-swatting, awkward work-chatting event, I headed to the hotel lobby to meet my sister, who arrived later than I.

I waited for her in the lobby, enjoying a bowl of warmed nuts and a bourbon – rocks. After she arrived and we put her stuff in the room, we went to the steak restaurant on property (interestingly named the Meat Market), had a giant steak and bottle of wine, and kicked off a hybrid vacation/work week.

Next morning, I got up for the first of my conference sessions, all about occupational safety and health. The sessions were really quite interesting, actually – a lot of industry folks, government folks, and lawyers from all sides were in attendance. My sessions ended each day at about noon, so that first afternoon, we ended up heading toward Old San Juan for lunch, and to see the forts. It was a beautiful day for it.

Old San Juan
Fort
Narrow streets
Fried cheeeeeeese
Classic P.R. lunch in the city
Wandering around the cruise dock
Bench decoration
P.R. Loooove
Street view
Pretty

The fort, the Castillo san Cristobal del Morro, was a stunner. A wide paved path cut a wind-blown expanse of grass in two, making a dramatic approach to the Morro fort. Families flew kites or lolled on the grass – one little girl was having a first birthday cake-smash photo session, but it was so windy out there on a promontory jutting into the water, her balloons were hard to manage.

Heading uphill to the fort
Selfie squared
Fort from a distance
Almost blew off the island in the wind

We paid our very affordable entrance fee (six bucks? Maybe?) and wandered around inside. The fort has been around for hundreds of years, and was an active fortification even in WWII, when it was used to look for German u-boats.

We caught the same taxi back to the hotel, from a bilingual woman named Barbie, who handed us a pink business card and told us to call her anytime we needed a ride. That night, we walked a block from the hotel to a nearby restaurant, where we ordered amazing fish dishes and fancy sangrias.

That day and the next, the sky rained ash. I never found out what was on fire, but it was something big. We had ash in our drinks, ash in our hair, ate ash and breathed ash. There was no smoke – just giant flurries of gray ashes.

Video doesn’t do it justice. The air was thick with floating bits – it looked like a blizzard.

With the next day’s afternoon, once my conference sessions were over, we spent at the pool and walking along the beach. The beach on Puerto Rico proper is Atlantic Ocean side, and so they are similar to beaches on mainland America’s Eastern seaboard. (Later, we would take a boat tour out to a separate barrier island off P.R.’s Eastern side, and on the far side of those islands, it gets very Caribbean – taffy colored water, whiter and finer sand.)