Wow, I have a ton of pictures from the last week. Cesar and I and the girls went to Puerto Rico last week for a friend’s wedding and made it into a little vacation. It was our first vacation as a family of four, and geez…it was chaotic to say the least! But we had a good time just the four of us navigating Puerto Rico’s crazy (and sometimes scary) roads. More on Puerto Rico later. But for now, let’s get into my week in Instagram pictures. They are a little out of order this week…I used a new program to make this collage and well…I got a little confused.
1. Before we left for Puerto Rico, we went to my parents’ house for dinner one night. My dad has a little garden that Sophia likes “helping” in, so even though she is extremely helpful with his garden, he went ahead and got her her own seeds to plant.
2. Here we are at the airport and on the plane leaving for Puerto Rico! We ended up taking Sophia’s suitcase as a carry-on, so she insisted she wheel it around the whooooole airport. That would have been fine and dandy if we hadn’t hit traffic on the way there and had about 45 minutes to get through security and get to our gate. Luckily, good ol’ JetBlue was running a little late, as usual. As you can see here, we were all happy to be heading out of Florida on our way to Puerto Rico!
3. This one’s a little out of place, but this was a sign I liked at the wedding we went to. It was very appropriate for this wedding. Everyone definitely wore their dancing shoes. I forgot mine (oops) but it was fun watching everyone else dance. Haha!
4. This was on Friday after we went to Casa Bacardi. We were on our way back to the ferry to get back to Old San Juan and it was like 200 degrees outside. We planned to get lunch after we got back to Old San Juan, but saw this place, SOS Burger, and decided to stop. This ended up being one of the best (and cheapest) meals of the trip.
5. The first night we were in Puerto Rico, we wandered around the cute little street our hotel was on in Old San Juan and stumbled upon Genesis Restaurant. It was really good, and Sophia decided she loves passionfruit juice at that meal. She drank like 10 more during our trip.
6. This was at Casa Bacardi in Cataño. It was fun, but again, it was so hot. And yes, it was appropriate for children!
7. Just a few short miles from our hotel (which took like 20 minutes) was Castillo San Felipe del Morro. We got there too late that day so we missed the tours of the fort, but we wandered around by ourselves. They had vendors all up and down the streets, so afterward we stopped and got some very highly recommended piraguas (shave ice that is shaved by hand).
8. Most of the touristy things in San Juan and Old San Juan close by 6:00pm. So on Friday night, we decided to venture into the heart of San Juan and find Plaza Las Americas (not my idea!). That mall was huge. We shopped for a while, got Sophia a stuffed dog at Build-a-Bear (which she herself named Rico for Puerto Rico), then ate dinner at an Argentinean restaurant called Fuegito.
9. On Saturday morning, before the wedding, we drove about 20 miles away to Carolina, where they have a children’s museum (Museo del Niño). When we arrived, the parking lot was pretty empty, so we looked and found out they open at 9 every day except Saturday (when they open at 10). We stopped at a store on the corner and asked a local where we could go to eat breakfast and kill an hour. He directed us to Panaderia Flor de Asturias. It was so good, but we were way outside of the tourist area of Old San Juan, and virtually no one spoke English around here. Luckily, Spanish is Cesar’s native language and I minored in Spanish in college.
10. Sophia had so much fun at the Museo del Niño and these were just some of the fun things they had there. Sophia was absolutely in awe that they had step stools that folded down for her to step on to wash her hands in the bathroom. They also had an entire row of kid sized toilets. We could’ve just saved the $26 admission cost and taken her to play in the bathroom. No, really. That’s how much she loved the bathrooms.
11. The wedding we went to was on the Coast Guard base in Aguadilla. It was a really fun time for Cesar, Sophia, and I. Emma took the opportunity to catch up on her sleep.
12. On our way home from Puerto Rico, we flew over the Bahamas on a very clear day. This is a picture I took of the Bahamas from our seats. We had a great view!
13. In the Museo del Niño, they had a Mini City. It was so cute, and had a whole little town of about 15 different places, complete with a police station, bank, mayor’s office, and fire station. Each of the places had activities and outfits for the kids to dress up in. Sophia loved this part of the museum.
14. From Old San Juan where we were staying to Aguadilla was about 2 1/2 hours. It would have been bad, except for this view we had for about half of our drive.
15. Since we missed the first Gator game when we were in Puerto Rico, we were excited to watch the second game. Sophia and Emma were not impressed (neither were we).
16. At least my littlest girl (and my biggest girl too!) looked cute, despite how terrible to Gators looked.
That’s the week I’ve had, as described through my Instagram pictures. I will do a Travel Recap post on our trip to Puerto Rico as soon as I can, because we had such a great trip, but until then…