San Juan

This is just a quick post today, to be able to post some cool pictures I took.  I had a business meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico the first week in February and just got around to looking at the pictures today.  This first picture is the view from my balcony, looking out on the Atlantic Ocean. Gorgeous!

The business meeting was good, my first board of directors meeting as an officer.  A couple of the directors were missing, but I think overall this will be an outstanding group to work with this year.  The new directors and officers had to come in a day early for orientation, so I was early enough to take half a day and explore Old San Juan with one of the new directors.  We had a blast, and walked our feet off.  There are two old forts, one of which, Castillo San Cristobal, is a national historic site run by the US National Park Service.  So we walked all over that, then walked to the other fort, called El Morro, and walked all over that.  

I ended up getting much more exercise than a normal work day.  It was uniformly beautiful, pretty much everywhere we went, and the food was amazing.  I also ended up learning a few things about Puerto Rico, like how far it is out into the Atlantic.  I always thought of it as Caribbean, which it is considered, but it's hardly even in the Caribbean Sea.  There's also a weird feeling I got a couple of times because Puerto Rico feels so foreign sometimes, like Spanish being the native language, yet you see regular mail boxes and delivery vehicles and the National Park Service, etc.  So it feels American and foreign at the same time. 

The other pictures in this very short post show the little guard houses at the corners of the walls, which are called garitas, and the forts are famous for them.   We also took a tour of the Castillo San Cristobal and went into the dungeon, where the figures of ships were sketched on the wall with a charcoal mixture by a sea captain prisoner back in history.   Then we went over to El Morro, pictured here.  And lastly, when touring El Morro, we came upon two large iguanas taking advantage of the beautiful day.  This was one of them.