Vacation with My #1... Day 1 (Fri; Feb 21)

Yes I know it's the middle of March and I'm just barely getting around to writing about our FABULOUS vacation that we took the last week of February . But when you have been gone for 9 days, getting back into the swing of things takes some time. Especially when you have a 3 year olds birthday to take care of, a full clientele to attend to, a Relief Society Lesson to plan, and not to mention the endless amounts of laundry/housework I was behind on. Now that I've caught up on all those things and given my Relief Society Lesson today, I feel like I can start this process of recording our vacation story.

 

We had a red eye flight to JFK then another flight to San Juan, PR. A week before we left I started to come down with a cold and it got so bad I lost my voice. Talking hurt so bad after a long day at work. The day we were suppose to leave I wasn't feeling all the way better, so I was worried I would be miserable on the plane. I stalked up on all the medicine that I thought would be helpful. And thankfully I was just fine. I slept almost the whole way. Not the greatest sleep, but decent.

 

We were so excited to fly over Puerto Rico. I still was in awe that this vacation had finally arrived. Jesse and I really needed to get away together. To reconnect and be US. We couldn't have done it without our amazing parents though. They were so willing to take care of the boys while we were gone. And knowing they were in good hands the whole time we were gone, we didn't have any worries about them. 

After we landed and got all our bags, we made our way to the rental car place and picked up our car. I was so frustrated with them. Never before have I had so many fees that were more than what all three days of the car rental was worth. But there wasn't a way out of it, so we had to pay it.

Then we had to find out where our hotel was. Crazy story about the hotel. So Thursday (Feb 20) I am at work and I see that I have an email from hotwire. They were the website that I used to purchase a hotel room. The email was informing me that I had my money refunded.

I was totally confused because I didn't understand why they would be refunding me the hotel money. It wasn't until I logged into my account that I saw that the hotel had been canceled. WHAT? We were leaving that night to get on the plane and needed that hotel the next day. I frantically call hotwire to find out what was going on and apparently the hotel had over booked their rooms. So they contacted hotwire and canceled our reservation. LAME right?

So here I am at work trying to take care of my clients and trying to book another hotel at the same time. I felt frantic. With it being the day before I was so concerned there wouldn't be anything available. Or we would have to pay out the nose for a decent place.

But thankfully (with the help of Heidi) we were able to find this quaint little hotel ten minutes from the SJU airport. It was a little bit more than we had originally paid for the first hotel. But I was ok with it considering the circumstances.

We had a room on the top floor, so this is the view from  it. We were right on a little bay. Seemed so private and quaint.

Inside was really cute too. I was very happy with how it turned out. It was hectic getting to that point, but I loved the room.

As we were getting closer to where the hotel was we started to get into neighborhoods that were looking very run down and old. It started to make us wonder what kind of hotel we'd be staying in. But once we got closer there was a gate around the hotel and we had a code to get in. And inside was very nice, so we were relieved.

Once we were settled, we thought we better go feed our bellies. We drove into Old San Juan to a restaurant, a friend of mine suggested we try, that had authentic Puerto Rican food. She suggested to for sure order Munfungo. So that's what Jesse ordered.

It wasn't our favorite, but now we can say we have had real Puerto Rican food.

Afterwards, Jesse thought it would be a good idea to find a beach to walk on. We were so tired from our red eye flight, we were trying to do something to keep us awake until bedtime. We would have gone to bed at 6[m if we could. I think we made it to 8pm.

As we were driving around, beach after beach was closed. But then Jesse found this one. Unfortunately it was covered in garbage and glass. After awhile we noticed our lower legs were covered in tiny little flies. So our visit didn't last more than ten minutes.

When we made it back to the hotel we noticed that our lower legs were covered in little red bumps. Our first experience of sand flies had bitten us. Little did we know how itchy they would become over the course of the next few days.  Now we know why that beach was open.