Vacationland Part 2

Well I’m very excited to put up Alex’s 10th birthday post from last Saturday but I just have all these vacations to get through! 😉

While Aruba was a shining star on the calendar a couple weeks ahead, I knew what came after that would be a black hole: February break, with the boys home 24/7 and zero.plans.and.i.mean.ZERO.

So I said to Jason, if I can present a reasonable option to go somewhere with them when we get back from Aruba would you say yes. Like would you consider back to back vacations. To my complete shock and awe, he shrugged and said SURE.

Run at high speed to the office. Commence massive googling. Where is good. A cruise? No. Two one way flights maybe? If that’s cheaper? Preferably jetBlue since we have the credit card and we are Mosaic. Resorts – gotta be in the Marriott family since we have the points. Can’t be too far. Search vacation packages. Last minute deals. Boys have sports on Sunday and on Saturday so 5 nights. Click, click, scroll, click, click scrollllll. Am at least an hour in when Jason points out the boys don’t have passports, do they?

SKREEEEECH. Dead stop. Hmmm, no they don’t. Can we get them in time? Back to Google, US Department of State website, skim skim, triangulate the grid on expedited options…No we can’t. Realize our choices have just vastly narrowed. Florida? No good, it’s been cold there lately and there’s no guarantee for beach weather. Which leaves…

Puerto RRRRrrrrico!! You guys, we loved it. LOVED it. And we didn’t even really scratch the surface of everything we could have done and explored there. We did get to zipline through the El Yunque rainforest, but the day we had booked to take a catamaran over to Culebra and snorkel, the ocean was really rough and it was cancelled. We did walk briefly around Old San Juan for dinner but didn’t get to El Morro, the bio bays, Rincon, etc etc! We can’t wait to go back. Without further pontification:

Vacation 2 Puerto Rico.
Home Base: Marriott San Juan
Travelers: Me, Jason, Ashton and Alex

It was a rough start – our plane was incredibly delayed and I think when we finally got into bed it was 3:30 am. But we were up and at’em the next day and it was basically four days of beach time with dinner out every night and the rainforest trip in between.

Ahhhh, nothing like enjoying the view from the balcony by watching our devices.
Ashton got ridiculously sunburned. Like, the more block I put on, the redder he got!
There was a casino in the hotel but since the boys could not play, we had poker sessions in our room.
Condado Beach
Ashton said Oooo those drinks over there are between $7 and $10! So Jason gave him a $20 and he came back with no change. Turns out they were $17 and the lady kept the remaining $3 for her tip Jason was thrilled.
If we werent’ playing poker, we were playing “Solitary”.

The boys also played Bingo every day at noon at the pool, which coincidentally was the same time I had my first mojito. They had ping pong, volleyball, and Alex made friends in no time so for the last two days we barely saw him. Ashton was a slightly moody tween so he preferred to sit under the umbrella and listen to his airpods.

What I loved the most was that we went out to dinner every night. We got dressed, put our phones down and played games and talked. Our regular daily lives are so full of school, sports, work, walking the dog, chores, carpooling etc. that we don’t spend very much time all together.

Perfect family February break: check! 🙂

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