Our next cruise stop was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We wanted to walk up to the old forts and check them out. Walking through the streets we noticed how narrow the roads were and the brightly colored buildings. It was pretty cool:
The first old fort we went to see was called San Cristobal. It was somewhat of a short walk (7 blocks) from the ship port. It was uphill the whole way. That made it easy to keep track of the destination, though. It was a nice 88 degrees in October which is still crazy to me!
Here's the entrance:
Thankfully, we have a 4th grader this year so we have a free America the Beautiful Pass. Matthew has this pass since he is considered disabled, but he wasn't with us on this trip so we were able to use Noah's pass--wahoo!
Once we checked in we were able to go exploring. It was pretty cool to walk around the fortress and grounds.
The views around the fort were really awesome.
It was fun walking through the tunnels:
Some of the windows had bars on them, but you could still see a nice view in between the slats:
It was cool learning about the history:
As we were walking around some menacing clouds started rolling in. Luckily, we didn't get rained on, but it was looking iffy for a bit:
My family all fit inside one of the look out towers:
You can see the second fort at the top middle of this scenic picture from the first fort:
After exploring the first fort we walked about a mile over to see the second fort, El Morro. Here is our group walking down the ramp of the first fort on our way to the second:
This fort is over 475 years old so there was some cool history to see and learn.
At the entrance in one of the slit windows there was a huge lizard just hanging out in the sun. You can kind of see it in the picture, but it was a good sized lizard:
The kids thought the triangle staircase was pretty cool:
There were a lot of cannon spots around the forts:
There were some narrow sentry boxes that gave me a bit of claustrophobia walking down them to see the view:
Here's the deepest part of the fort:
Noah and Nick were good buddies:
We did lots of walking around so an occasional break was nice. Here's part of our group taking a break on some stairs. Josh and I were at the upper level so we had nice vantage point of them:
At the end of the day while we were walking back to the ship we passed by a few historic sites that Aaron and I took a quick look at:
Before getting on the ship they had some vendors out selling their wares. Daniel got his first chance at haggling for a souvenir:
As we were walking around looking at the vendors someone gave Sarah a rose made from a palm frond:
Puerto Rico was a pretty cool place. I would like to go back and see more of it if I ever get the chance:
After getting back on the ship we had a quick dinner and headed over to the Hasbro Game Show even happening in the theater. When they got started they wanted to get participants from the audience. Once my kids heard that they went pretty crazy:
As did everyone else in the audience:
After picking 10 people to participate from the audience (4 of them were from our family group--Michonne, Tom, Josh, Miles). They were asked to play Simon memory game. They were given a series of colors and they had to move around to get their team set up in that same color series if that makes sense.
Our team kicked butt and won all the challenges--wahoo!
Afterward they got to pick out a Monopoly playing piece on a card to use later.
At the end of the game show everyone who had a Monopoly playing piece card got to insert it in the machine to see what their prize number was. Who ever had the highest prize number won everything. Here's everyone waiting to insert their cards:
Here's Josh's turn. The Cruise Director Matt kept making jokes about Josh being a giant man. It was pretty funny. Anyway, Josh didn't win the big prize, but everyone who played at least got a Hasbro card game that has been fun to play.
After the game show Aaron and I went up on deck to watch the ship pull out of the port. Here was the last view of the old forts as we cruised away:
It was a really fun and interesting day. We really enjoyed San Juan, Puerto Rico.
No comments:
Post a Comment