Puerto Rico - Day 1

I wrote this last night, but didn't have internet access.

Matt and I arrived in Puerto Rico last night around 11PM. We had a good flight and things went smoothly with our rental car. That’s when the smoothness stopped. We quickly discovered that our GPS didn’t have any of the hotels in its memory and it couldn’t even find the street the hotel was on. We found ourselves driving around San Juan at midnight. Matt quickly had to learn that driving in Puerto Rico isn’t like driving back home – some of the general traffic rules don’t seem to apply. Blinkers are not commonly used, merging consists of just moving over without looking and lane markers appear to be optional. In additional, we seemed to find ourselves in some…interesting…neighborhoods. But after driving today, it appears that there are large steel fences, gates and bars on every building.

Anyway, we eventually found our hotel and crashed. We picked up some maps from the hotel and headed to the El Yunque national rainforest. We found our way easy enough (this was in the GPS) and started driving around. We started with the visitor center and did some reading about the rainforest. We then headed up the narrow, winding road through the rainforest and up into the mountains. We drove as far as we could and parked. We started on a hiking trail and after a long hike of about 2 miles, we found a fantastic observation tower.

We then headed back down (and met a few Wisconsinites on the way – I was wearing my Brewers hat) and got back in the car. We then stopped at another trail. The sign at this trail said that there was a waterfall at the end of the trail. It also said that the hike was .5 miles, round trip. We were tired, but since it was short, we did it. However, it ended up being a very difficult 2-mile hike. We were exhausted when we got back to the car and drove to the hotel.