Sunny San Juan

Overall, we enjoyed our stay very much. Let me start by saying every staff member we met was just great here --- helpful and friendly, even when working on Christmas day when they might have wanted to be with their family.

The Courtyard sits directly on a very nice stretch of sandy beach, with one restaurant having outdoor tables beside the beach. There is also a pool and bar area adjoining the beach. The long Isla Verde beach is very pretty with nice smooth sand, although there was a mild seaweed zone you had to get through to get out into body-surfing depth water. The beach wasn't hugely over crowded and you can easily stake out your space for relaxing.

The Courtyard hotel had three places to eat: a small ice-cream shop which also sold sandwiches, the main lobby bar, and the main restaurant. The large bar area takes up most of the lobby and it was comfortable bringing kids there to eat at a table.
The food at the bar moderately priced meals there, but nothing elegant, but the quality was not bad. It and the ice cream shop were fairly priced, I'd have to say. The main dining area usually had big buffets and was considerably more expensive. We didn't have a rate that included breakfast so we never had that at the hotel.

There are several other restaurants and hotels a short walk up the road and a grocery store that you can walk to in about 20 min. We felt comfortable walking up the sidewalk to get to the other restaurants. You aren't totally disconnected from from other restaurants at all like you might be at a more isolated resort.

Our room for four was nice. Very clean and up to usual Marriott Courtyard standards easily. Very much a standard upscale (but not luxurious) US hotel room. No complaints there at all.

It is next to the airport. Inside our room, this didn't bother us at all as the windows seemed soundproofed enough. It was kind of annoying to listen to the planes taking off when on the beach or walking down the Isla Verde street to other restaurants but the takeoffs aren't so frequent that it ruined our stay or anything. The view off our balcony was not impressive -- a small glimpse of the beach, but a big view of air-conditioning, trash dumpsters, and a really ugly condo building next door. That view plus the noise pretty much rendered the balcony useless.

The other buildings around the Marriott looked like condos that were way past their prime and mostly vacant. I'd be very leery of renting a condo in San Juan after seeing them.

Staying here, you are fairly far from Old San Juan, not just a short walk or bus ride away
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Overall, we enjoyed our stay there and it is a pleasant place to relax by the beach. The Courtyard touts itself (and is priced) as a resort, and they try to take care of you pretty nicely. There is also a casino in the hotel if you are interested. There was a pretty good band in the lobby bar at night for entertainment.

Arecibo Observatory is the world's largest telescope. It's huge dish for collecting radio waves is set in a hollow in the karst landscape of north-central Puerto Rico, about two hours west of San Juan. The main spherical reflector, fixed in place, is 305 meters across and is composed of over 38000 individual aluminum panels. The telescope's super-cooled receivers are suspended in the air above the dish on a mobile platform which is moved to pick-up the signals coming off different directions from the reflector.

Arecibo has been a tool in many significant discoveries in radio astronomy, such as measuring the rotation rate of mercury or determining the periodicity of the crab pulsar, and it acquires the data for the SETI@home search for extraterrestrial intelligence

Arecibo has been featured in numerous movies and TV shows, including my favorite, a great fight scene in a James Bond movie.

Visiting Arecibo is very interesting and educational. You begin your visit with a short film about how the scientists work at Arecibo. There's a very nice visitors center which is sort of a hands-on science museum with exhibits explaining how Arecibo's science works and other displays about our solar system. On the path leading up to the telescope, there's even a scale model of the solar system. The nice visitor center/museum provides more to do than just drive there, see the dish, say, "Wow, cool" and drive back.

You need a car to get to Arecibo. Most of the drive is along a high-speed tollway stretching west from San Juan. Then you turn south through the interesting limestone karst terrain, which consists of vegetation-covered limestone hills interspersed with sinkholes where the underlying porous limestone caves have collapsed.

There are other more active, adventurous activities related to caves and rivers in the area, but they were closed the day we happened to visit, so you may want to plan ahead to make a whole day of it. Arecibo itself is not open every day, depending on the season, so definitely check ahead. Except for June-July and Christmas-New Year's time, it is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.

El Morro guards the entrance to San Juan harbor. The imposing stone fort was begun in the 1500s and was used as a military post up through WW II. You're free to wander around the forts multiple levels and take in the gorgeous views of the sea from just about anywhere within the structure. The bathrooms here probably have the most stunning views of anywhere in the US National Park system.

We didn't have a guided tour, but the leaflet you get with your admission does a nice job of explaining the function of various rooms and giving a little historical background. We enjoyed exploring the whole structure, marveling at the thickness of the walls.

El Morro is at the far west end of Old San Juan. It's impossible to miss it. Images of the sentry towers adorn the Puerto Rican auto license plates. It is served by the Old San Juan free trolley system, but good luck getting a seat on one of those. They fill up pretty fast.

A scenic walkway goes around the exterior of El Morro along the ocean. But you can't gain access to that path from within El Morro, you have to start on one side or the other of the fort.

Bacardi has a huge rum distillery just outside of San Juan, billed as the world's largest. They offer a free tour of it, complete with two free rum drinks.

We were driving back towards San Juan from Arecibo and decided to stop off for the tour. Even though it is not very far off the freeway, it took us a long time to get there because we must have driven past the place 3 times before we finally figured out where to turn. (And this was before having any of the rum!) Plus we had to wait for some odd parade of every police vehicle belonging to the Catano locality (and they have dozens!).

Yes, we took our teenage daughters through a rum factory.

While waiting on our tour we enjoyed our free drinks (non-alcoholic for minors, of course) in their open air bar-pavilion which was really nice and relaxing. From there, you wait for your tour group to be called and then ride off on little trams like the ones at Disney parking lots.

The tour itself is a little disappointing because you don't actually get to see the insides of the factory, just exhibits in a visitors center. But as visitors centers go, this was a very nice big one, and was actually interesting and entertaining. They show you a nice film about the history and family of Bacardi. You get to walk around some old casks and try some little "what's behind this door" quizzes and smell the different varieties of rum. There might have been a little more, but it isn't anything terribly grand. Then its back on the tram to the bar/pavilion.

If you really need to spend $85 on a special bottle of rum not-available-anywhere-else, then you can also stop by their gift shop.

In summary, the tour isn't anything great, but we had fun and learned a little and it was on our way back to San Juan. The drinks were free! Don't feel bad if you come to Puerto Rico and miss this, though.

As an aside, during the film, they show a bunch of video commercials for Bacardi rum. It is sort of interesting how blatant the "drink rum, be one of the beautiful people" message is. It was a fine example to point out to our underage daughters to help them see through what advertisers want you to see.

The Embassy Suites is a few blocks off the beach in the Isla Verde area of San Juan. It is a big place, with the typical Embassy Suites architecture of the big central atrium.

The three walk block to the beach wasn't really a big deal for us. The hotel provides pool/beach towels that we took along, and we felt comfortable walking back inside this very nice hotel even after spending a couple hours in the sand of Isla Verde.

There's a nice pool behind the hotel also. Not really deep or any good for swimming laps, but with a few little areas and waterfalls that make it fun for kids to play in.

You get the standard suite her, with a main bedroom and a living room with a couch that folds out into a double bed. A small kitchenette is also included and a nice bathroom. The room and linens were up to regular Embassy Suites standards and very nice.

Some nice highlights: 1) A very nice included breakfast, with made-to-order omelets and fruit. 2) A daily afternoon manager's cocktail party. You get free beer, pre-mixed alcoholic punch, and soft drinks, as well as bar snacks like popcorn or pretzels. Predictably, it tends to be very popular, so you have to stand in a long line for the bar drinks, so you can't really get that many, but it is still very nice and a pleasant way to unwind in the Atrium.

There's an Outback Steakhouse restaurant in the hotel. There are plenty of other restaurants within easy walking distance, also (just don't go in the fast food chicken place up the street towards the beach -- it was the worst ever!)

We were lucky enough to spend New Year's Eve here. They had a fun band in the atrium bar for the celebration. You didn't have to buy any tickets or anything if you just wanted to hang out in the atrium and listen. (The hotel also hosted a more exclusive New Year's Eve part where tickets were something like $75-100/person, including food, band, etc., in one of their ballrooms. It seemed like the free band and party was just as much fun.)

We spent Hilton Honors points for our 2-night stay. Considering that our stay included NY Eve, it was well worth the points.

The Holiday Inn Express is in the Condado district of San Juan, which is about midway between the historic Old San Juan and the beaches of the Isla Verde area. It is too far to walk to either of those, so you'll need either a car or the local bus to get around.

Our room was very standard USA Holiday Inn stuff: 2 nice double beds, very clean, nice clean bathroom. The rate included a nice enough self-service breakfast.

We found the front desk staff were pretty friendly and nice as far as check in and out, and were helpful with driving directions and tourist information questions.

We were driving in. It is a little tricky to get to the HI Express and Condado in general. You have to get just the right off ramp. There's a lot of traffic, and we couldn't really spot this hotel from any distance. So bring very good, very explicit directions, and have the other passengers watching out for the hotel. The hotel has a limited amout of reserved off-street parking. We were lucky enough to get the last spot the night we were there.

The Condado district is a very festive and lively area, with a lot of restaurants and clubs, ranging from fast food chains to very upscale options. We felt comfortable and safe walking around here. There are a couple very large hotel/casinos in Condado also. It's a modern, busy, urban area.

We felt it was a good value for the price, compared with many other San Juan hotels and B&Bs.