Day at Sea/Day #5 (Tues; Feb 25)

We were so excited to sleep in. And with the rocking of the ship and the darkness of our stateroom I sleep so well. The remainder of the day we read up on the top deck and ate. Another relaxing and lazy day. It's so nice not having an agenda and getting away from the every day crazy schedule at home.

 That night was elegant wear. This is as fancy as we get. The other couple we sat at dinner with went all out. She was wearing a formal gown and he was decked out in his military dress blues.

 But for us this is pretty fancy. So we were happy with it.

After dinner we walked around the ship, listened to a live band waiting for the comedian show to begin. He was actually really funny. Sometimes they are too crude for my liking, but he was pretty good. I think we also went to a standup magician as well. I didn't really want to go but glad I did, he was very fantastic.
Then my grandma clock sunk in and I was tired, so we hit the sack.

St. Thomas /Day #4 (Mon; Feb 24)

We were ready to have a lazy day. So far we had been pretty active (which we love) but St. Thomas was a day meant for the beach. When we got off the ship we found a taxi to drive us to Meagan's Bay to relax. The driver was way cool because he actually took us to an overlook of Meagan's Bay first. It's so beautiful. That water was calling my name. 

There is something therapeutic about the white sand below my feet, the clear blue water in front of me and palm trees above my head. AHHH!

Then to have Jesse at my side relaxing together completes the whole package. 

Jesse went out snorkeling to see what he could find. From the shore he saw a turtle's head pop up on the surface. So he wanted to go out and check it out. But he didn't make it in time, the turtle was gone. But he did see some crabs and brought me one back to the beach to show me.

I went out with him for a bit. There wasn't too much in the bay. Nothing exciting. Tons of clear white fish. After awhile my bug bites all over my legs were stinging too much so I went to dry off.

 We spent the whole day just relaxing. I think at one point I fell asleep on my towel. Before it was time to go we got a picture of the palm trees.

 Nothing too exciting of a day, but very relaxing. Days like this are just as important as our adventurous days.

Dinner time came and we got to meet the couple we would be eating dinner with every night. Maureen and Doug Hess.

Vaction Day #3 (Sun; Feb 23)

After some searching on lds.org we found an English speaking ward in Puerto Rico. Sacrament started at 9:30am, so we had to wake up early to check out of the hotel, go eat breakfast and find the church in time. For the most part our phones were really good about giving us directions. But we struggled a bit to get there. Thankfully we gave ourselves enough time that we walked into the chapel just as they were singing the opening hymn.

 

It was very interesting pulling up to the building. Seeing a  gated fence around the entire property and bars on the windows gave it an different feel. But once we were inside the Spirit felt the same. The Lord's Spirit is the same all over the world.

After sacrament meeting was over we drove about an hour and a half to Rio Camuy Cave Park. Since our cruise wasn't leaving port until 10pm we tried to find something to do that could fill our day.

 

When we arrived we had to wait a little bit to watch a cheesy orientation video that was in Spanish. Haha. Don't worry it had subtitles. No really it was so cheesy I couldn't handle it.

 

To continue the cheesiness we lined up and our group had to board a little train. The train drove us down to the mouth of the cave. 

 

 Hard to tell from the picture, but here we are about to enter into the cave.

 Kept going down into the cave.

Once we got it we got to see this huge cavern. It is about 700 feet in length and 215 feet in height. That's 2 football fields in length. Crazy. Wikapedia says... "Over 10 miles of caverns, 220 caves and 17 entrances to the Camuy cave system have been mapped so far. This, however, is only a fraction of the entire system which many experts believe still holds another 800 caves. Only a small part of the complex is open to the public."

The caverns are part of a large network of natural limestone caves and underground waterways carved out by the third-largest underground river in the world, the Río Camuy (Camuy River). This picture is showing everyone looking over into the river. It was so far down. Crazy that a river could be underground.

 As we were leaving I found this spot fascinating. It was just so pretty. The picture from Jesse's phone doesn't quite give it justice.

...so I found one online. Even still, you can't get the same feel unless you are really there.

 

Remember me telling you about our visit to that junky beach? Well on this day we were dying with how bad they were itching. If we weren't moving it was all we could do NOT to itch them. Jesse was a lot better at not itching than I was. I had never had something itch like this. It was more of a burning itch. If I did itch it made it worse, but when I didn't itch I felt like I was going to go crazy. Ugh. And they were ugly to boot.  

 

 

 Next stop... Cruise Ship! On the way though we got some lunch, filled up the rental car with gas and returned the car. We then waited for a taxi to drive us to the peir. We were so excited! The 2 1/2 days in Puerto Rico felt like it's own little vacation, but then we still had a week long cruise ahead of us.

After we got our bearings around the ship (which didn't take long because it was set up the exact same as our last cruise) we went to dinner. This night wasn't assigned where we sat. So they sat us on a two person table, but it was so close to the other two person tables that we felt like we should talk to the couple next to us. Which we did for over an hour. They were a really nice older couple who have been on so many cruises. I kinda think it would be fun to travel all over the world with Jesse once we are retired and kids are out of the house.

I can't remember too much what we did after dinner, I do remember having a break down of itching. I couldn't handle it anymore and just went crazy. I itched so hard (with a towel) I scrubbed a few layers of skin off my left shin.

Once the ship finally left the port Jesse was able to go to the little convenience shop to buy some Benadryl and hydrocortisone cream to help us.

Thankfully the Benadryl helped us sleep well so we wouldn't wake up with the sheets making our legs itch some more.

Cy's Three Years! (Mar 3)

I know I just started telling our vacation, but I think I should get Cy's Birthday Celebration recorded. The day after we got home was Cy's birthday and Jesse had to work and the following Sunday he had to work too. So I my only choice was to have his party on a Tuesday night (Mar 4) when Jesse would be home. Unfortunately the Smith side of the family couldn't make it. So there was just an handful of family members that could make it from my side.

 

Being in vacation mode I wanted to make things simple. I usually like to make a cake, but I decided to order one from Parsen's  Bakery and to hold a dinner at Pei Wei. 

This made me laugh. He LOVES rice so much and watching him pour on his own soy sauce made him seem so big.

After dinner we all headed back to our place to open gifts and eat cake and ice cream. Cy was enjoying being the center of attention. He's so handsome.

 Opening his presents.

 Our family reunited after mine and Jesse's vacation. Ya know, that vacation was something Jesse and I really needed. Coming home to these sweet boys is the best welcoming gift. I love that moment right when we get home where they are beyond good because of how much they missed us. I wish I could bottle up that moment and give them a dose when they are having rough days.

 I took Cy with me when I went to Parsen's Bakery so he could pick out the decorations for his cake. And he picked a firefighter theme. How fitting.

 He loves chocolate everything. So of course we went with a chocolate cake with chocolate filling. Can you tell that he is enjoying his birthday cake?

I love this little dude so much. There are many times he makes me feel completely melted by his sweetness, then with the flip of a hat he makes me want to pull my hair out. I know the age of 2 can cause a lot of mischief, but I think he has some mischief in his personality. So I am hoping the age of 3 will be better for all of us.

I want to share a some facts and stories about Cy.

-Weight: 33lbs (65%)
-Height: 37 1/2 inches (53%)
-Blood Pressure: 98/56
-He has a favorite blanket with a special corner that I still haven't figured out which one it is. Each night for bed I have to give him all four corners for him to feel and see if it's the right one.
-He loves Salmon (Crazy huh?)
-Loves chocolate milk (anything chocolate he calls chocolate milk)
-When he gets frustrated with something he throws his food/utensils on the floor.
-The past few weeks he has really struggled going #2 in the toilet. So we have had several occasions of cleaning up his soiled underwear. One time he went on the carpet in his bedroom. I found him in there with it smeared everywhere. On the blocks, blankets his dump truck. GROSS!!!!
-He loves to play "Hi". He'll say to me "Hi mom" then I say "Hi Cy" over and over and over. It's funny.
-I love when he randomly gives me hugs. They don't happen very often but when I do get them he really means it and they are tight ones.
-For a few months he's been sleeping in his crib without the front bars on it. So it looks like a day bed. We really should set up a big boy bed for him, but I don't think his room will fit it very well. And I'm not ready for Ryker and Cy to share a room yet.
-Loves wearing his jammies. If I let him he's wear them all day long.
-Also he loves just hanging out in his underwear, even when the house is freezing cold. I have to force him to put clothes on, and then he's upset at me.
-He wants to do everything himself. Such as buckling his own carseat buckles, washing his own hands, mixing his own oatmeal, or climbing in and out of the truck.
-He LOVES oatmeal. He eats it almost every morning. But I have to make sure it's just right every time. He insists on bananas and raisons mixed in. And if it's the slightest bit warm he has a fit that it's "TOO HOT!" If he's extra hungry the fit turns into a full blown melt down.
-Him and his brother love each other so much and are the best of friends (and sometimes the worst of friends). But if there is a problem between the two of them, Cy is getting better about saying Sorry to Ryker.

To grateful to have Cyrus in our family. He keeps us all on our toes and leaves us with no dull moments. I may feel crazy with him at times, but I wouldn't change it for a second. Love him so much!

El Yunque & Bio Bay /Day #2 (Sat Feb 22)



Saturday morning we woke up early and ventured our way inland to go hike around El Yunque National Rainforest! It was about an hour and a half drive from our hotel. But along the way we started to wonder if we should have purchased some ponchos. So on the way there we ended up going on a wild goose chase to find some ponchos. After finding a Walmart and standing in a ridiculously long and slow moving line, we got our ponchos. Which in the end we didn't even need them. Isn't that how it works though? If we didn't have them, we would have wished we had them, but then having them we didn't need to use them.

 

There is one road going into the rainforest. Only one way in and only one way out. Which for tourists like ourselves simplifies things. The road was narrow and the drive was beautiful. It was just so green and lush. 

We stopped at the visitor center to figure out what we should do and see while we were there. They gave us a paper map of the trails. (I found this one online and drew the route that we hiked so you could get more of a visual of what we did).

We parked our car at the Big Tree Trail Head and that's where we started.

This is us along the trail headed to La Mina Falls. This part of the trail was concrete, but it was kinda wet so it was a little bit slippery. Thankfully we had good shoes on. But look at that scenery. It's not every day that you get to experience that.

 This is us when we arrived at the falls. There were several people getting in the water to swim around. But we weren't interested. You can tell by the picture how much mist there was. We continued from there to head on to the Peak trail.

 We noticed that this trail wasn't as popular as the falls one. It was suppose to take 4 hours round trip, but we knew we could do it a lot faster. Along the trail we would see waterfall after waterfall. It was like we were hiking inside a postcard picture.

 Jesse has a great eye for spotting things that others wouldn't notice. He saw this SNAIL climbing up a tree. When he pulled it off the tree the snail retreated into it's shell. I couldn't believe the size of this thing. Only in the rainforest.

 When we finally made it to the top of El Yunque Peak it was surrounded by clouds that we couldn't see anything, but whiteness. Not gonna lie I was really bummed. The reward for reaching the top is the view.

This trail was a lot more primitive than the concrete one to the waterfall. I liked it. And again...The scenery is to die for.

The trail split off and we could go back to the bottom or over to this tower. So we decided to go see the tower.

 The top of the tower had a way better view than what we could see on top of the Peak. So I was very happy we chose to see the tower.

 At this point we had met 3 guys and we got talking with each other about where we were from, what we had done and why we were there. Ya know? All the tourist talk. They offered to drive us back to our car since we left it at the start of the waterfall hike. It was very nice of them to offer. We were going to just walk down the road once we came out of the trails, but this worked too. We were feeling hungry and thought it would be nice to get going. We had hiked for 5 hours through El Yunque and our little snacks weren't holding us over anymore.

On our drive out we stopped to get a picture by La Coca Falls.

At this point we headed to the city Fajardo to continue our adventurous day. On the way we found a yummy Mexican restaurant and a frozen yogurt shop (not the greatest, I was wishing for some YogurtLand at the moment). Trying to kill time before our Bio Bay tour started at 8:00pm. Thank goodness for smart phones to gives us GPS directions and restaurants near our location.

We got to the bay and checked in with our tour company. All the while we were waiting for them to get things started I sat and wondered if I dared bring my camera with me. We were going to be on a kayak for the next two hours and my camera isn't waterproof. So it made me nervous to bring it along. But I wondered if I could try and risk it and just be careful? No. It wasn't worth losing my camera and not having one for the rest of the vacation. Jesse brought his GoPro camera with us, but we got this one and only picture from it. For some reason it stopped working after we got started. Such is life. I'll just have to explain things the best I can because this was one of the coolest experiences we have ever done.

I pulled some pictures from the web to try and give a good feel of how things went. You can see in our picture above it was pretty dark. So they fashion each kayak with a glow stick on the front and back. We were all to follow the guide in a single file line with another guide at the end. We paddled out of the bay and they took us into a channel with mangrove trees. Once we got in there is was really calm and dark. Next thing we hear the guide yell back to us "Put your hand in the water". So we did and we were amazed to see it start to glow neon blue with the touch of our hands.

It was something like this. Again I found this picture online, but it gives you a glimpse of what we saw. Truthfully pictures don't do it justice. It's one of those things that you have to experience in person.

How does it glow? Well, the water has microscopic plankton called,  Pyrodinium Bahamense that glow when they feel threatened. So with the touch of the paddle or our hands the water around it glows. Almost sparkles really.

The channel that we were kayaking in was a mile long and it leads to a lagoon called Laguna Grande. It wasn't very wide and each side was full of mangrove trees that were so thick they met in the middle like a tunnel. It made the channel very dark, so this is where the glow sticks on the kayaks came in handy. Besides the glowing water, the glow sticks were the only light we could see.

As we got closer to the lagoon the glow seemed to get brighter and brighter. Every so often we would see a streak of blue under the water left from a fish swimming away really fast. Seriously the whole time, Jesse and I were just like kids in awe of this unbelievable experience.

Once we got to the lagoon the guides let us paddle around for a little bit before we had to head back through the channel. We were told that the night we chose was perfect. There wasn't a moon out and the current in the channel was perfect to see the glowing water through the channel. I guess you can't always see the water glowing in the channel. And we were able to see it going in and going out. We felt very fortunate.

As we started to head back to the bay, and Jesse and I wanted to stay in the back of the line. We started to talk with the guide that was bringing in the rear. He was telling us that he had been doing his job for about 8 months and every night was like experiencing it for the first time. Never got bored of it. What a cool job?

We made it back into the bay and was sad that our tour was over. But VERY satisfied with everything about it.

What a great day!!!



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.