We spent the first 3 days on the island of Vieques which is a few miles off the coast of Puerto Rico. It was beautiful. This is the guest house we stayed in called Bananas, it has a little restuarant/bar out front. Very rustic and fairly inexpensive but this.....
was the view out the front. The little town we stayed in, Esperanza, was adorable and had a prominade build on the water. The whole island is overrun with wild ponies that roam around and there were all these random dogs roaming around too but they weren't strays since the shop owners could identify them and knew who they belonged to. The dogs would just roam in and out of the open air restaurants and no one really cared. Needless to say it was very laid back there. 
This is Belly Button, the only breakfast place in Esperanza but no worries because the food was amazing. We ate here both mornings we were in town. The best thing we had were these......
banana pancakes. So so good. I tried to make them at home like this were you grill the bananas and pour batter over them, but mine were not nearly as good as theirs. Delicious! We also spent an entire day at the beach. We chose Sun Bay because it was nearby and we could walk along the coast to get to it. We were a little apprehensive about going there because it is a more developed and popular beach. 
No worries there. The beach was great, there were not a lot of people and they had planted palm trees all over the beach to provide shade for visitors.
This was my view as I laid on a towl enjoying the sun and reading a book. 
The water was great too, so warm and blue and not too deep in Sun Bay. So relaxing. They also had bathrooms and a little cafe there where we had the best empinadas and tacos of our trip. It ended up being a fabulous day at the beach. That evening we took a Bioilluminscent Bay tour. Puerto Rico has 4 Bio Bays (there are only a handful in the world) and the brightest in the world is in Vieques. I don't have any photos because there was no way to keep a camera dry but it was pretty amazing. The water is full of little micro-organisms that emit light when they are disturbed (as a defense mechanism) so once it is dark the tour guide tosses everyone out of their kayaks into the water to swim around and as you swim the water glows blue green. It was pretty cool. The later is got, the darker it got, the brighter the water glowed. It was a fantastic experience that I would recommend to everyone.After Vieques we returned to the main island and moved into a condo we rented in Condado. We were one block from the beach which we could see from our balcony.
This is one end of our condo's pool where we spent a portion of almost every day we were in Condado. So nice! With the condo as our home base we adventured out to the grocery store (we had a kitchen so we ate a couple meals a day at home), out dancing at the Mariott across the street where they had Salsa night and a casino, to the beach just down a short side street, the girls took a jungle tour which I opted out of, and also a full day spent in Old San Juan.
We caught a free bus to Old San Juan to look around a little bit. The city was built behind a large wall but they have built walking paths around it....
And in a few places are these huge gates to get through the wall. 
We roamed the streets and peered into shops and looked at landmarks like this...
Banco Popular, the first bank in Puerto Rico which is a great example of Art Deco architecture. Actually there was art all over this city, especially in the form of sculpture. We stumbled upon sculptures at almost every turn. 
We stopped in a plaza for some shaved ice from a street vendor then continued on our adventure.
We ended up here on the top of a hill at the site of the old fort. The photo doesn't do it justice but on the massive lawn there were tons of people flying kites. There was also a craft fair going on to the left of this photo which we walked through. 
Unfortunately we didn't watch the clock close enough because the fort was closed by the time we go up to it. We didn't get a chance to look around inside but we had a great day in the city. We stayed for dinner before heading home. On our last day in Puerto Rico we decided to live the high life and buy day passes to the Ritz Carlton.
With a day pass you get a room for the day and access to all the facilities. Big fluffy pool chairs, free towels and water, poolside food and drink service, and beach chairs and umbrellas set up for you by cabana boys. 
Here is a big iguana that just mosied out from under a bush and walked past all the guests. Cool! It was a fun day in the lap of luxery. We stayed for a very fancy smancy dinner at their upscale Italian restaurant. Unfortunately, though I had been really careful with my skin the entire trip I did manage to burn my ENTIRE backside that day at the beach. It was beet red and very painful. Good thing we went home the next morning becuase I was not a fan of the sun after that! It was a fun trip. Returning to lots and lots of work was less fun. The only thing I wish was different about the trip was that Greg would have come. He didn't really want to spend a week with 3 girls being girly but I missed him a lot.
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