Celebrity Cruise: Last night and San Jose, PR

Our amazing journey was coming to and end! We had spent 6 days already on the ship but had one more left, day 7--at sea. 

In the evening, at sunset, we took some pictures outside of our dining area. 

Glorious view of the peaceful ocean! 

In case you wanted to see us closer. 

Let's reshuffle a little bit. 

In the evening we took a our final picture with our staff who probably thought we were quite a fun bunch who ate a ton of dessert. 

I admit it's always sad to say goodbye to the staff we meet on our cruise journeys, but we also realize that they are doing it for 6-9 months at a time and that if today they say good bye to us, they will be saying hello tomorrow to the new people on vacation. 

The following morning, as we disembarked (a bit in a hectic way) on a rainy day at San Jose, we took a taxi to the historic downtown. Our suitcases went directly to the airport which was super convenient! 

We walked and walked in the rain, trying to see the main sites (that we had already seen once on our cruise stop in 2019). 

It was only fitting to find the umbrellas street on a rainy day. 

Don't be fooled by these pictures--everyone was pretty wet and ready to get out of this rain. 

Normally, San Jose is a much more crowded city, but as you can see in the back, just a few cruise passengers were wandering around town at this point before their flights back home. 

Our friends had an extra night in San Jose so they did a bunch more exploring. But we flew home that afternoon. 

It was an epic trip and we are so happy we did it! Cruises are probably the most relaxing kind of vacations for me and I love them. We missed Katya, of course, but still had a ton of fun with just the boys! They keep asking to go on another cruise!

 Lyana. 

Celebrity Cruise: Puerto Rico--It's Just the Beginning

Writing about our family adventures almost a year later is not ideal, but not writing at all about them is quite unacceptable. So here we are! Ten months later...but let's pretend we are still in the moment, shall we?

Let me tell you, when your kids are in high school, priorities really shift to being present at school when school is in session. I remind ourselves multiple times a year how grateful I am that our big Asian and European travels happened when no one was in high school yet. And now we pretty much have to travel only during the summer, spring or Christmas break. 

This year was a special year because it was Alex's senior year! Originally, like Katya, Alex wanted to visit Ukraine and go somewhere else. Ukraine was not possible...so we focused on finding "somewhere else". We went back and forth between Dubai and Jordan and Egypt and finally after much painful deliberation and research, we decided to take a nice relaxing cruise to South Caribbean. I know it almost sounds like a cop out. A cruise? AGAIN? But we have always really enjoyed our cruising experience for the simple reason that for us cruising is truly a vacation. Plus the kids really do enjoy the social aspect of it and this time they were older--14 and 17 years old. 

So we chose a cruise with Celebrity Cruises, catered to adults and families with older kids. We were cruising out of Puerto Rico (so we had to get there first) and then stopping at a few amazing places like St. Lucia and Barbados. We were super excited!!!! 

And then! Two weeks before our trip, we had a double date with our friends, the Roylances and we talked up our cruise so much that they went home that night and booked their cruise for their family (they have two daughters that are our boys' friends). We were super excited, of course, but we decided to make it a little more interesting and promised to keep it a secret from the boys that they would have friends on board. 

So on the first day of the spring break, we flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the first time ever! 

Our flight got it pretty late, so that night we took a taxi to our Hyatt hotel (booked with points), rested and in the morning, Robert got picked up by Enterprise to go get our rental car for the day. It was more convenient for us to do that for a day than Uber. 

We were keeping our plans pretty relaxed for the day, so the biggest assignment was to explore El Yunque National Forest. I could not remember it's proper name ever, so I may or may not have renamed it to Younique Forest. 

We drove around 30 minutes to its entrance. We had to pay about $2 for entrance but we did have to reserve the ticket online. Ever since the hurricane came through Puerto Rico and damaged the trails and vegetation massively, a few areas in the park had been closed and still not reopened. We drove the scenic route and stopped at a few places to walk around. 

Our hike was pretty mild but steep, humid and beautiful. 

We stopped at a place where in the middle of the last century, they had a beautiful pool where people could bathe. Kind of a nostalgic place. 

The views from the parking lot if you drive all the way to the top. 

Our hike took us to an overlook tower to see the view of the island! 

Just another Puerto Rican picture. 

And we did hike up to the waterfalls. 

I can't say they were spectacular or anything insanely unique. But they were fun for the boys. 

Mark clearly "enjoyed" himself. It was pretty cold. 

And that was the extend of our excursion to the El Yunque Forest. 

We drove toward the coastal area (you don't have to drive very far to find it) and found a bite to eat. Food was actually quite expensive. 

We also got the acai bowls which were pleasantly not too sweet...but expensive. 

In the evening, we got cleaned up and told the boys we are going to eat at a certain restaurant near a fancy resort. Little did they know that when they got out of the car, we all "surprisingly" ran into our friends, the Roylances! The kids were so surprised and excited! We spent the evening getting some food in the dark (that took too long) and getting swarmed by little gnats flies that were everywhere. 

Later at the hotel, the boys reinstalled the blinds...because they were installed the wrong way and did not work, so they fell down as we tried to close them. Hyatt...take note. 

In the morning, we were ready to rumble! We dropped off our car and took a taxi to the cruise port. 

We were SOOOOOOO excited to embark on this weeklong journey!!!  

To Be Continued...

 

Adventure of the Seas--San Juan, Puerto Rico

Our stop in San Juan, Puerto Rico started like this.

It wouldn't be blog worthy if it weren't such a rare occasion for Mark to throw a tantrum over a silly thing like his parents making him find and wear a hat as they don't joke with the sun! Maybe that's the side effect of eating too many shrimps...we don't know...

In any case, our first half an hour in PR was not particularly fun, but now we all can laugh about it and remember Mark's little episode because he is HUMAN!:)

And this is how we ended our stop! See? Everyone is happy (and Mark is still wearing a hat).

But let me backtrack a bit. Puerto Rico was not a stop where we had a tour or anything, and we only stopped there from 1-9 pm. So we decided to take our own walking tour through the streets of San Juan to soak in the atmosphere. 

The town is definitely unlike any American town I've seen. I know Puerto Rico is technically a US territory but it was quite beautiful and sort of South European in a way. 

We tried to find the less travelled streets but it was hard. 

Everywhere we turned, we could see the cruise ship people. 

Here is a neat place in the Old Town. 

Katya "went to town" with these umbrella selfies-haha. Or should I say "to Old Town"? I'll just be cracking myself up here is the corner, don't mind me:)))

We also walked towards the Fort San Cristobal but somehow we didn't get any awesome pictures by the fort! Everything looks kind of like this...

Anyway, we walked around that area some more--having a hard time telling you what in the world we learned...

There was a cemetery by the sea, right next to the fort. 

Oh, here we go! A semi normal picture of the fort in the background and lots of people flying kites and running around. 

Well, after walking for quite some time in this humid heat, we found an open church to sit down and cool down a bit. And then we walked over to one of the kiosks to get some shaved ice and churros.

We finished our walking excursion with eating popsicles overlooking the beautiful city of San Juan. 

And again all was well in the Watson family:)

To Be Continued...