Puerto Rico

I went to finish a post that I started typing last week and I also found this post hiding in my Drafts folder from January.... eek. You can tell from the last sentence that it's obviously incomplete but I don't know if I'll ever add to/finish it so I may as well share some of it!

It was summertime in Phoenix... so it was hot and I was cranky. Jake has the opportunity to go out of town with his job occasionally but I'm usually in Phoenix working my 40-hour amazing retail job. Yes, that was sarcastic. Retail is never amazing. Anyway, I was itching to get out of town and we had the perfect excuse-- our 7 year wedding anniversary. I began looking at some travel options. I wanted something really exotic-- like a Mediterranean cruise. However, I could only get one week off from work so something closer to home made more sense. Plus Jake has not updated his passport since it expired. So what's the most exotic place we could go without passports and within our budget? Puerto Rico! I'm actually glad that we couldn't travel any farther because I'm not sure we would have otherwise ever visited PR.

We had a blast! I took pictures but they were with my new smart phone (which I still have and still hate) and I'm just unfamiliar with uploading pictures from my camera onto my computer. Yes, I am an old fart and I refuse to give into this new technology. Somehow I have figured out Instagram and you can check out a couple of Puerto Rico pics under my name @codythegirly. Haha, before I posted that sentence I had actually typed it as a hashtag. #codythegirly. Then I googled #codythegirly and Instagram came up with the @ symbol at the beginning of my name. See, I really don't get this new age stuff.

ANYWAY, we had fun. We couchsurfed 3 nights, slept on the beach with new friends one night, and got a hotel one night. Our first couchsurfing friends were a very artistic couple who are trying to start a hostel in San Juan. They had two other surfers staying the same night and we went out to a bar and played pool for a while. The city of San Juan stays up late. The people are all about living life which was a welcoming start to a vacation. Even though most of them have jobs during the day, they find it equally important to go out at night and dance and have drinks with friends. We met a guy at a gas station who invited us to a local spot that was a few blocks away. Jake and I squished into his front seat and went to meet a bunch of his friends. We asked everyone what we should see while we were visiting and they marked up some spots on the tiny and simple map that we had received on our flight. It was a pretty fun first night in a country that is half-familiar. More about that later.

Our second day we headed west along the north coast to Arecibo.