Puerto Rico - Day 1

We just took a fabulous trip to Puerto Rico. It was one of my favorite trips of all time and best of all we got to spend time with my brother Garrett who just got back from Puerto Rico after serving for 2 years. We were able to see the places he lived, the people he met and so much more! The trip was a surprise to Garrett - he was going back with mom and dad but didn't know that the rest of us were meeting them there. They flew out the day after he got home and stopped in Dallas for a day to see Chad, Britt and the boys. The rest of us were planning on leaving the day after them and meeting them at the airport in San Juan. I decided the best way to do show everything from our trip is to just go day by day - so here we go: Day 1.

Josh' parents were kind enough to allow our girls to spend the week with them while we took our trip. We dropped the girls off and then headed to the airport for our 12:50 am flight Friday night/Saturday morning. It was such a wierd night because we didn't sleep much and then also lost 2 hours in our travel - so I wasn't sure what time it was most of that night and next morning. Hayley, Caleb and I spent the first few hours playing the "in flight Trivia" game with some others on the plane. It's a 20 questions game and most of the questions are seriously random and it's just a wild guess to get the question right. Caleb won the first game, Hayley won the second and I was on track to win the third until Caleb swooped in a snatched it from me with the last question - Lucky guess. That's all it was. He's really not smarter than me! We flew from Salt Lake to Atlanta where we had about a 4 hour layover. We grabbed some breakfast and then most of us fell asleep on the floor, bench, or wherever we could find. Hayley was awake watching our stuff for us (thanks Hay) while we tried to get a few minutes of shut-eye before we boarded the next plane. She told us that while we were sleeping, another flight from our same gate was in the final stages of boarding. One of the passengers from that flight was worried that we were going to miss the plane. He walked over to Josh who was sleeping on the floor and said to him, "It's time to get on the plane!" Josh of course didn't hear him but the guy saw Hayley looking at him. She told him that we were on the next flight and the guy apologized for almost waking him up. The rest of the trip, whenever someone wanted to wake anyone up, all they said is, "it's time to get on the plane!"

We got on our next flight to San Juan and by then it was morning and we had lost a night of sleep.

We tried to find comfortable positions, but none of us slept much that flight either.

We got to San Juan just an hour before mom, dad and Garrett did. Hayley brought these signs for us to hold up for Gar. We were going to do something fun and jump out from around the corner or line up somewhere that he couldn't see us right away. But it ended up that we were too tired to do much besides sit on our suitcases and wait for them to come down the escalator. When he saw us all sitting there he said, "No way! You guys are all here!" He was excited and so were we to be in sunny Puerto Rico! Grandpa and Grandma Iverson, Grandpa and Grandma Wisniewski and Jim and Laurel also met us at the airport to spend the week with all of us. We grabbed some lunch at a restaurant just across the street from the airport.

Grandma Wisniewski and her brother Jim.

We rented some minivans for the week and drove about an hour to a place called Humacao which is down on the southeast end of the island. We ended up getting a little bit lost on the way so it took a little longer than we expected. We rented 2 beach houses for the week and this is the one our family stayed in. Dad, mom, Justin, Steph, Hayley, Caleb, Garrett, Josh and I.

The vans we rented were KIA vans - one tan and one blue.

The beach was literally just steps away from our house - just behind those palm trees.

This is the other beach house (sorry about the cloudy picture - it was so humid there that our cameras were always fogging up.) G and G Iverson, Wisniewski, Jim and Laurel stayed here - they lovingly were called "the oldies" for the week, just to make it easier. Their house was just on the other street - a quick 2 minute walk.

That was it for our first day in Puerto Rico. By time we got to the beach house and all settled, it was dark and we were exhausted from a long day of traveling. We all unpacked and then headed straight to bed. I don't think anyone had any trouble sleeping that night!