San Juan, Puerto Rico

in Pinmapple3 months ago

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sharepuertorico.com

Where it's at

Puerto Rico is a caribbean island with a unique geopolitical climate. The whole island is a territory of the United States, but where most people in the United States speak English, the primary language in Puerto Rico is Spanish.

How to get there

Being an island, you can't reach Puerto Rico by car or rail unless you're already in Puerto Rico. Common ways to reach Puerto Rico include flights or boats. My previous visit to Puerto Rico was just a layover to another caribbean island. This time I visited as part of a cruise with Norwegian.

Things to do in Puerto Rico

My cousin booked an excursion through sharepuertorico.com to a natural waterslide. If you take a cruise there are always plenty of shore excursions available through the cruise line, but booking through third party websites can save you a lot of money.
My party met our tour guide next to Plaza Colón which was a short walk from where our ship docked.

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discoverpuertorico.com

The plaza is dominated by a statue of Christopher Columbus on top of a fountain. The plaza is well worth visiting whether or not it's part of your tour.
Our tour guide drove us to the El Yunque national forest where we took a short hike to the waterfall/water slide pictured at the top of this post. After we all had a chance to go down the slide we hiked down to a smaller water slide with some cliff jumping and a beautiful waterfall grotto for a photo op.

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viator.com

The jumps were not super high at this location, maybe about 8 feet, but you had to be careful of where you jumped in or you could hurt yourself hitting the bottom.

Following our time in El Yunque we were taken to a restaurant at the beach where we were treated to some authentic Puerto Rican food. I don't remember what many of these items were called, I tried a dish that was crab stuffed in Yuca, breaded and deep fried. I had another dish that was a cheese stuffed deep fried corn bread. I also enjoyed a virgin Pin Colada.

One more stop

Our tour guide dropped us off back at Plaza Colón. I had nearly an hour before I needed to be back on the ship and I wanted to see the the umbrella street Calle de la Fortaleza, so I walked there.

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tripadvisor.com

When I arrived, I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. The street was barricaded off and there were no umbrellas. I did see the strings crossing the street at regular intervals where umbrellas had been hung. I asked some nearby police officers if this was the street. They confirmed that it was and told me that the umbrellas were down to change the attraction. I assume that they were just switching to some different color pattern of umbrellas.
I plan to check this location again the next time I'm in Puerto Rico, I was pretty sad that I didn't get to see it.

I'm still new to the Pinmapple community, this is my third Pinmapple post. I would love to make so much money blogging about travel that I could quit my day job and just do this, but I'm not expecting much. I do plan to share some more posts about the ports from my cruise and I'm not sure when I'll next have an opportunity to travel.

I'm sorry to not be using my own photos from this trip. My phone drowned in the Dominican Republic. I plan to make a few more posts about this trip using photos from online and will plan to use my own photos for subsequent trips.

What sort of information do you like to see included in Pinmapple posts? I’m hoping to keep them fairly short and sweet. What do you think of my format for this post? Any constructive criticism is appreciated, but use your words. Telling me to make my posts better is not helpful without examples and/or descriptive words.

I hope this post has been helpful and informative. Thanks for reading and thanks for all the upvotes, reblogs, comments and follows.

Lastly, I'm hoping that this community will be interactive. I would love to hear your comments and considerations if you happen upon a post about someplace you've lived or visited. I'll try to do the same for you when I stumble onto a post about somewhere I love to visit.

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