Puerto Rico--Day 3

This morning I had my alarm set for 7:45 so I would have time to get everyone ready on time for today’s adventure. I was awakened this morning at 6:00 (keep in mind my brain is still on California time, so that’s 3:00 a.m.) by a torrential downpour. Straight down, cats and dogs and all that. I couldn’t get back to sleep until well after 7:00, and when my alarm went off, I hit snooze a couple of times, and then apparently turned it off. Next thing I knew, it was 9:00 and time to leave. Oops.

The plan was to meet John’s parents at El Yunque National Forest at 10:00, but that we’d call when we left, and it takes an hour to get there. So, when we got up, we were already late. And to top it off, we couldn’t get cell reception this morning! The cell reception has been really strange around here. We’ll have a full signal, but we can’t get any of our calls to connect. It works better as the day goes on, but in the morning, nothing. Weird. If we leave the community and get out on the highway, no problems.

We couldn’t call and let them know we were going to be late. Sigh.

Eventually, we got everyone up and got on our way. We got to the entrance to the El Portal Rain Forest Center and met up with John’s parents and enjoyed learning about the rainforest, the history of the park and getting some information on what to see. After we had a quick lunch in the cafe, we carpooled up the road into the rainforest and visited what we could easily get to from the car, which was a good amount. We plan to return and hike later on in our trip. Sam has to make up a Cub Scout hike he’s missing while we’re gone.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia article about El Yunque.

The El Yunque mountain and rainforest were originally set aside as a preserve in 1876 by the Spanish Crown and is one of the oldest preserves in the Western Hemisphere.

There’s a nice drive up PR 191, originally built by the CCC in the 1930's, where you can get to the trailheads and some of the sights. We saw a number of beautiful waterfalls, pools and trails built at the same time. This is a little map of the drive up 191 that kind of shows where things are located.

Here's Ruby at El Portal, showing everyone where we are.

This dragonfly was just sitting there next to a little waterfall.

This is one of the waterfalls along the road.

John and me at Cascada La Coca.

The kids at the top of Yokahu Tower, which offers a beautiful panoramic view of the northeast corner of the island. This picture is looking back toward the interior of the island.

The tower itself is pretty cool-looking.

This is Baño Grande, one of the baths built as part of the CCC project. It's located at the top of a long stone staircase, but it's very beautiful and cool and breezy up there. The water for the pool comes from a waterfall behind the bridge, runs under the bridge, into the pool, and then down another waterfall.

This is the waterfall after the pool. The stairs to the pool run up the right side of the waterfall. You can just see the kids up there at the top on the bridge. The picture of the pool and stone bridge above was taken from just behind the kids, facing the other direction.

Squig was on the stone bridge there, sitting on one of the railings when she decided to take off her shoes. She took one off, set it on the edge, and then while she was taking off the other one, she knocked the first shoe into the water. We watched helplessly as it swirled in the current and started drifting down under the bridge. We got lucky and it got stuck under the bridge and John found a little path that led under the bridge. He also got a picture on his phone of Squig going after her shoe.

We took a lot of pictures and then drove back to GrannieB & PapaJohn’s hotel where we had dinner together and a quick swim before leaving the kids for a sleepover with their grandparents.

On the way back, John decided to show me a “scenic route that won’t take more than 5 minutes longer than the regular route”. This sounded like a bad idea to me: a route he hasn’t traveled in years, at night, in the dark, through the interior of the island, without a decent map or a GPS. I experessed my reservations, but he assured me that it would be fine, he knew where he was going.

Two hours later, after getting lost, finally finding a road that was actually marked on our complimentary Hertz map (which has all the Hertz locations on the island prominently marked, thus obscuring more than one useful road label) and after some turning around and backtracking, we made it home.

I might let him try it in the day time. Maybe. It did look a little more interesting than driving around the coast until we got onto the little back roads that make the back roads of New England look like four-lane divided highways. There was one point in the road where some sort of concrete culvert jutted out into the road, cutting a two lane road down to one and almost a half, but it was still a two-way road and cars were still going both ways. At full speed. Harrowing. I can’t believe we haven’t seen any accidents yet.