Puerto Rico - the next adventure

Seems to be the year of travel..Soon after we came back from India, mama changed jobs and so we took a mini vacation right before she started her new job. We dashed off to Puerto Rico for a week. Of course, for the entire week leading up to it M was chanting "I go Puerto Rico". Mama's last day at work was Friday, Jan 22nd and we headed to the airport that very night!

We were out for an entire week and had a nice two-bed apt in Old San Juan for the duration. M was super well behaved(or slept through) the flight and settled in quite comfortably in the apartment. He had his own room and we had ours - along with washer/dryer and a fully equipped kitchen.

Highlights of the trip:
- Drinking dudhu from the balcony every morning, watching about the army guarding the Governor's mansion next door. That meant cop cars, cop motorcycles and of course, gun-weilding cops(!).
- Intro to Plazas. Every other block ends in one in Old San Juan and the sight of one of them seems to set off something in the brain of a 3 yr old. A seemingly uncontrollable urge would take over him to run loose, scream, chase any hapless pigeons that happen to stray in his path, trip, climb steps, catch the spray from fountains - not in any particular order and all at once if it were possible.
- A new fear of ..well any animal. Cats were abundant and we even had a resident cat in the building. A new ritual for entering or leaving a building was created, which involved *a lot* of screaming and either letting a cat in or out(which is all it wanted in the first place). Pigeons were friends for one evening, where he even fed them out of his hand.
But on a following visit, M and I "attacked" by a mob of hungry pigeons!
So pigeons were out. He was already scared of dogs, so that remained unchanged. Seen here trying to recover after a stray dog happened to walk past us in the rain forest. Poor dog!
We did encounter a horse at our guide- Raul's - dad's house, and that elicited a similar reaction.
You get the idea..

- Roughing it out.
Our lil' trooper was so amazing as we made our through jungles, waterfalls and caves.He walked everywhere with a smile on his face - even in the rain and happily jumping in for a dip in freezing cold waterfall water with Raul uncle.
He even braved a blowhole with crashing waves that had me more than a little nervous..
- Garbage truck watching.
We didn't know this, but San Juan is a *super* clean city and garbage trucks come by TWO times a day to pick up trash. You can only imagine what that did to M. We *had* to stop an watch the truck finish its pickup, wherever we happened to be, at any time of day or night. He also had new heroes - the cool "uncles" hanging on the back of the truck. Seen here trying to emulate one:
- Just hangin' out..Old San Juan was perfect for just walking around, stopping for a bite or a drink, taking pictures of the gorgeous old facades and M loved every minute of it.
Of course, this also meant we tried every bathroom in the city as we walked all over. Most "experiences" were uneventful, he even had fun in some of them:
But a few were....well, I probably don't need to go into detail on that topic.

Now I need to find something nice to end this post with..How about an image of the gorgeous, warm sunshine: