Back from the Island

Its been a while since I last blogged. As most of you know, I took the family down to Puerto Rico for the week.

We left on Monday morning (10/15), and despite horrible storms in DFW and the threat of cancellations, the flight got out though a bit late.

We were greeted by some real bad traffic as we made our way out of San Juan to Palmas Del Mar, the resort community our hotel was located on.

I had read that Puerto Rico is one of the most densely populated places in the world (more dense than Manhattan NY, and even Bangladesh) so I wasn't sure what to expect. Sitting in the traffic, the stats were confirmed.

Palmas Del Mar is located on the eastern side of the island about 50 miles SE of San Juan. It is a huge developed community with marinas, golf courses, condos, hotels, beach, etc. It was pretty nice. Definitely secluded from the rest of the island.

We laid low on Tuesday hitting up our hotel pool and the hotel beach. Nothing to write home about, so I won't, but the kids had a good time.

On Wednesday, we headed up to El Yunque National Forest, the only Rain Forest in the US National Forest program. The Rain Forest actually consists of 4 different types of forest. The park is on the slopes of a mountain that starts around 300 ft in elevation, and goes up to 3,500 ft, so the forest changes as you reach higher altitudes.

you can drive about 2/3 of the way up the mountain, so you can really see some of the changes in a matter of minutes as you make your way up. We toured the visitor center which was nicely done with some interactive displays. We drove up to La Coca Falls and got out to take some pictures.

Then we headed further up the mtn and got out and did a short hike on the Bano Grande trail.

This park was really well done, and I could have spent the hole day hiking it. I'd highly recommend it.



On Thursday we headed in to Old San Juan to walk the streets and tour the San Cristobal Castle. It was the warmest of the days we were there, so besides getting a little sticky, it was very cool.
We decided to come home a day early, primarily because we had done all that we planned to do, and the hotel pool and beach weren't enough to get us to stay for another day.

We planned to jump on a 9:30am flight on Friday morning, but didn't get on as a flight from San Juan to Tampa was canceled due to a mechanical issue, and all of those passengers got reacomodiated on any flight with empty seats. So we ended up hanging out in the airport until 5:00pm and got on the last flight of the day. We had packed only enough diapers to get us home on our original morning flight, so between rationing water to keep diapers dry, and borrowing diapers from complete strangers in the airport, we made due, but it sucked.

I'll be the first to tell you that flight benefits for airline employees just don't cut it. In this day and age of record high load factors, and an over loaded Air Traffic Control system, traveling stinks, and trying to travel standby just doesn't ever work flawlessly for me. I'd have more patience if I was alone or with Ingrid, but standby with little kids is a disaster wating to happen.

So its nice to be home sleeping in my own bed again. I've got a 10 mile run on the schedule for today, and am searching for motivation to go out and do it. I probably need to start soon or it aint gonna happen.

Have a good week every one.

PS. anyone looking to watch all or parts of the IM World Championships can catch the re-feed here