Escape NYC: Puerto Rico
Still catching up! We’re up to February, 2022. Ah, winter in NYC- grey, cold and miserable. The perfect time to escape! Though Chris and I are both cold-weather-people, a short visit to a sunny place (with lots of sunblock packed) does wonders. We usually try to escape around February, looking at ticket prices and picking a place that may not be top of our list, but is affordable and easy for a quick get away.
Looking for a warm place where we wouldn’t face any of the constantly-changing travel regulations, we (along with seemingly everyone in NYC) landed in Puerto Rico. We stayed in Old San Juan, keeping it a low key city trip rather than our usual vist-everywhere-we-possibly-can road trip.
I got to see pelicans in the wild for the first time! We spotted them one night when walking home from dinner and returned the next two nights to watch them swoop and soar to their tree after a day of fishing on the water. What big, weird, stinky birds, I couldn’t get enough of them! I don’t think everyone shared my fascination, the ground under their favorite tree was covered in dung and smelled - not so hot. The ever present cats didn’t seem to mind though! While waiting for birds to come swooping we made friends with some of the locals. There seemed to be a pretty decent cat-caring organization (Save a Gato) set up with shelters and food for the resident felines. Though I’m sure that does go a ways to explain why we didn’t see more smaller birds in the area!
I also got to see magnificent frigate birds for the first time. At first I thought they were kites piloted by the families enjoying the wide open green fields in front of the fort. But no! A bird! They flew over us as we walked the sunny path around the fort, and I got dizzy tilting my head up to try to capture them.
Overall it was a fun trip, plenty of sun (perhaps too much), some decent vegan food and a nice reset from life in the bustling grey February city. If we return, I think we’d skip Old San Juan all together and head out to the jungle, perhaps even figure out a way to visit what’s left of the Arecibo Observatory, a site that has loomed large in my imagination ever since watching the film Contact. :-P
