Puerto Rico

My youngest sister Hilary chose to have a destination wedding in Isabela, Puerto Rico, as I've mentioned briefly before. Seeing as how Puerto Rico is a nine-hour trip for us, minimum, we decided to make a full week-long vacation out of it.

The flights to Puerto Rico, while long, were relatively painless. Most importantly, Evan demonstrated once again that he's an excellent travelin' baby. Here he and I are having some fun in the food court during our 4-hour layover in Houston:

We spent a night in San Juan, the capitol, at the beginning of the trip, then met up with my parents as well as my sister Hallie and her fiancé Mark the next day to drive across the island to Isabela (a two-hour drive). Isabela is a small, largely undeveloped community in the northwest corner of Puerto Rico with one quiet, beautiful beach after another. The wedding took place at a very nice beach front resort, Villa Montaña, where most of the guests stayed, but because there were so many of us from my Dad's side of the family in attendance we rented a few condos just a 5-minute walk up the beach from the resort. This basically meant we could hang out there most of the day without having to pay to stay there at night, although we did have to suffer the indignity of bringing money with us to buy food and drinks. We learned to cope, though.

This is a picture of our back yard at the condo:

While we were in Isabela we spent most of our time doing beach things... swimming, snorkeling, playing in the sand, reading in the sun, and other general forms of laying around. Here Evan and I are getting ready to go swimming down in front of the resort:

Also while we were in Isabela, of course, my sister got married... we think. They won't know for sure if it took until they get their marriage license in the mail, which could be quite a wait given how dedicated Puertoriqueños are to getting things done in a timely matter.

At the end of the weekend the rest of my family had to fly home, so we drove them back across the island and spent the last few days of our trip back in San Juan. While we were there we spent a day in El Yunque, the only tropical rain forest in the United States:

We also spent a fair amount of time walking around Old San Juan, the exceedingly picturesque part of town where the Spanish first built their settlement:


As you might expect, we had a great time. So much so that I won't stop talking about it for the next 8 or 9 posts!