San Juan, Puerto Rico

Next morning and another island right again and this time we dock

at 7am in Puerto Rico.  I don’t want to miss things in this port, so we’re up and at em pretty early with all the kids dressed and ready to go and the parents kind of coming along needing caffeine.  I was responsible for researching this port and have decided that we have to do the old forts most of all because I’m a history person and find it amazing that things built 500 years

  ago can still be standing against hurricanes, saltwater and man’s interference all the time.  I’m pretty sure that we can reach everything on foot or catch the town’s trolley system to push us along, but have been wrong in the past.  I’m gratified to learn that there is the trolley

system at the information desk and that can just walk to the fort that is closest to the dock.  There is a lively market starting up and two ships in port and two more coming in while we’re there, so San Juan is being inundated by cruise ships today.  I make the mistake of telling Oscar that Lin Manuel Miranda is in San Juan now playing Hamilton at the theater and now I get the question with every step we take through the streets of San Juan, “where’s

  the lamplighter?”  Because even though he knows a lot of the words to Hamilton, Miranda is now the lamplighter from Mary Poppins Returns to him.  I have to finally take a minute and stop, look him in the eye and explain that our chances of running into a major star on the

 streets of San Juan by chance are remote in the extreme and we won’t be seeing the lamplighter at all while we’re in port.  He takes this well and we head on into the first fort.  It’s going to be $14 each for the adults to enter this Unesco world heritage site, but guess 

 what?  It’s free day at the park and we make a donation in their cool donation box because we feel bad for getting in on their one free day a month, but lucky at the same time.  These people that run the park aren’t getting paid right now because of the government shutdown and are having to let all these cruise people in for free and seem very happy about it.  Maybe because they live in Puerto Rico.  We decide to walk the entire fort that runs the across the La Perla district of

 San Juan because the fort is so awesome.  It’s amazing how it was set up by the Spanish and defended for 400 years and then modified by the US military into something to take out German u-boats in WWII.  The kids are having a great time running up and down and over

  battlements, up ramps, down hills, through guard towers, but when it is time to walk to the next fort, we have the whiniest, hottest, more tired Michiganders you have ever seen.  Suddenly, it’s too hot and can’t they get a drink and some air conditioning or it’s too far

     and can’t they be carried?  We do stop for snacks and drinks at a little stand and this moves the group along to the next fort and again, they’re running and jumping around with energy that the adults didn’t have.