Thelma and Louise: San Juan: Wherein Thelma & Louise Went Rogue

Monday afternoon we sailed into San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sailed? That’s the right verb isn’t it, even though there are no actual sails?

El Morro

San Juan Cathedral

Before that, I’m trying to pin down what we did. I think I napped for a time. We opened up the top of our window, and the sound of the ocean, just put me right to sleep! Oh! And I also flooded the bathroom during my shower. Like 2 inches of standing water. Not entirely sure how that happened, but it took every towel we had to mop it up. Eek!

Back to San Juan. We signed up for a tour of Old and New San Juan. So we circled up with our guide, and a small group, and headed out.

Our first stop, well the first one I want to talk about anyway, was Castillo San Cristobal. San Cristobal was built to defend the city of San Juan after significant attacks from the English and Dutch in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The fort was started in 1634 and completed in 1765. We arrived too late to tour the inside of the fortress, but enjoyed exploring the outside!

City walls were also constructed at that time; they wrap around most of the city.

Our guide was…distractible? I’m trying to qualify the experience in the most positive light. ;) And the group members were…nah. I’m going to leave that one alone! But it was almost 90 degrees, and I polished off my water pretty quickly, which meant my patience sort of deteriorated as well.

Anyway, we wanted to see the city, stop and take pictures, and wander where we wanted to. And so we did! Ha! Ditched that tour guide! There was one more ship in port besides ours, and as it was a beautiful evening, there were people everywhere. I say all this to qualify to my father that WE WERE SAFE. We walked down no dark alleys, well mostly none, and didn't even get to show off our (well, one of our) Spanish. Fun fact, back in the day, this is where mom and dad lived for several months to learn Spanish in the Peace Corps. (Not San Juan, but in Puerto Rico.)

We first headed toward El Morro, which is another citadel, which we passed coming through the harbor. San Juan is full of beautiful and diverse architecture, and tons of color.

Castillo San Felipe del Morro was started in 1534, and finished in 1790. It's guarded the city during many battles, and was only retired as a military position by the US Army in 1961. Now it is maintained by the US Park Service, and was declared a World Heritage Sight by the United Nations. We couldn't go inside here either, but loved the surrounding views. Lots of locals were flying kites on the grounds, watching the sun go down, picnicking and so on.

We were so hot! One would swear we are sitting on the actual equator, but apparently it's still 1,000 miles away! I insisted on these being black and white so you cannot really see the tomato quality of my face. Sunscreen did the trick though - super warm, but no sunburn! Woohoo!

This is me playing with selfies while mom figured out how to get us back to the ship. ;)

We watched the sun go down on San Juan and headed back to the docks. All in all yesterday, we walked a little over 5 miles, and boy am I feeling it today! We are both so happy that we went off on our own so we could have a T&L adventure.

Last looks at San Juan!