I am living in the Rain Forest!

This week was pretty exciting!  On Monday night, we found out that a tropical storm was coming and going to go right through Puerto Rico on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning!!  For a moment, it was scary, but then to tell you the truth, it's pretty exciting to get ready for a storm.  On Tuesday, we filled up water jugs and made sure we had batteries, flashlights and candles.  Then at 5:00 p.m. it started to pour A LOT of rain.  Did I think to take a picture of it?!  NO!  So unfortunately no pictures for this adventure :(  But then in about 15 minutes the rain stopped.  Then at about 10:40 p.m. there was lightning and LOTS of wind.  The power went out but then everything settled down within minutes.  The kids and I were kind of bummed that there wasn't more of a storm.  There is just something thrilling about being in a black out and playing board games by candle light.  When we woke up on Wednesday, we found out that the storm completely missed Puerto Rico and we just had some of the north winds caused by the storm.
On Saturday, we went to find some of the hidden treasures of El Yunque (the national rain forest).  Our first stop was these little natural pools of water that were super clear and full of fish.  Yep, and you can swim with them and WE did.  Weird at first but then really cool.  There was also a rope swing.  Oh, you better believe we tried it out.  Especially because we were super pumped about everything in the rain forest, because ironically we had watched Tarzan a couple nights before.  
Conquering the rope swing.  Ya Buddy!

Then we went on a hike up the Juan Diego Falls.  It's a series of waterfalls that fall into each other.  And the higher you go up, the bigger the waterfalls get. 

You can actually get into the pools of water at the bottom of the waterfall and stand behind or in the waterfall.  Way fun and way freezing.

 That's me in there!












Then after playing in the waterfall for a little while.  I decided to hike higher to the next waterfall even though the trail was straight up and I had to pull myself up by the roots of trees.  But this is what I saw when I got to the top!!  Well worth it.









So, of course, since I was at the bottom of one waterfall and at the top of the one I was just standing in, I decided to walk back through the stream to be right on top of the waterfall and say hi to everybody else below. Hello!  Livin' the dream!!