We packed quite a bit into our week in Puerto Rico. Our first night here, we went to a local restaurant called Alavara. (I attached a clip of that on our home page vimeo video. I'll learn how to embed it soon.) It was the perfect introduction to Puerto Rico. We sat outside at a picnic table, ate a variety of empenadas and listened to a local musician. Good friends, traditional food - it was a beautiful evening.

The next day we visited Old San Juan. It was incredibly hot so we stopped for some piraguas or snow cones with local flavors like tamarindo and parcha (passion fruit). It was the perfect treat as we walked along the streets lined with walls that were originally built to protect the city.

After a large lunch of tapas and sangria (yum), we visited El Morro. This is a fort built in the 1500's which was designed to guard the entrance to the San Juan Bay.

Michael and Liam watching all of the kites flying outside of El Morro

Our next visit was to the Rio Camuy caves. This was an expedition into the third largest subterranean river system in the world. The tour takes you through Cueva Clara which is a small part of the ten miles that was carved out by the Camuy River about a million years ago. From what I understood from the introductory movie prior to the tour, the limestone caves were only discovered in the '50s (even though the Taino Indians used them for shelter long ago) and turned into a public park with guided tours in the '80s. We took a tram down a winding trail about 200 ft. to the caverns and then we were able to walk inside. It was a very slippery path, but it was amazing. While my son didn't consider it a 'cave' due to more than one opening out, he was impressed that part of a Batman movie was filmed here.

From the bottom on our way back up on the tram