Day 8 - 4/5/24

Today we got up and were still full from Lechonera last night so we skipped breakfast and immediately got on the road. Our plan for today was to find some caves and try to go in. Unfortunately for us the day had different plans. 

The first few caves/trails we tried to go to either were closed or we couldn't find the trailhead. And this sounds like it didn't take a lot of time but this first bit of the day took a couple of hours. For lunch we were thinking about stopping at a roadside stand to get Pinchos or Turnovers since we hadn't done that yet this week. But before that we tried to figure out a mystery we've been trying to unravel all week. There's a 3 sided statue in the medians occasionally that have a carved Silhouette of a man in them but we can't find anything about who the person depicted is. We've exhausted every search term, 'metal silhouette', 'metal monument', 'metal silhouette in Puerto Rican median', etc. And while we were looking today we came across some other monuments including a statue called 'Birth of the New World' which is a statue of Christopher Columbus and was apparently the tallest statue in the U.S., it was purposely made taller than the Statue of Liberty. Apparently 5 cities rejected having it built there but Puerto Rico agreed. We'd seen so much failure so far in the day we decided it'd be interesting to take a look at at least and it wasn't too far out of our way.








When the thing first came into sight I swear I thought I was looking at a villain's castle. It just stood out way too much since it was in the absolute middle of nowhere.
And then we got closer and it started to take shape. It's honestly a beautiful statue and it's a shame we couldn't get closer. I don't support anything about what Christopher Columbus did but I can still appreciate the piece.


Then we continued our quest for hiking and caves, only to be met with more failure. 


At last, we stopped at a Pinchos vendor for lunch. The place was called Wipe's BBQ Pinchos and it had smoke coming out of it so it seemed trustworthy enough and I was definitely right!
Anika Rating: 9.9/10
Was a bit messy but other than that it was super good.

Once we were done there we were just about ready to give up, when the next place we tried let us down we decided to stop by the overlook we saw earlier before we drove to scout out Old San Juan (our plan was to hang out there all day tomorrow before we flew home).





And from there we drove to Old San Juan. For the most part we just wandered around near the fort until we decided on where to eat dinner.











We ended up deciding on pizza because all week Clover had been talking about it because it felt like we'd been seeing pizza joints everywhere so Clover was curious. It was blazing hot in the fields outside of the fort but once we headed into the streets of Old San Juan it was shady and a breeze was blowing. As we walked through Dad said it reminded him of the French Quarter in New Orleans. 













It felt like a city in a dream with all the colors and the variety of music spilling out onto the streets. All too soon we made it to the pizza place but that was magical on its own. The front hallway was barely a person wide with green curtains on either side, we traveled up two flights of stairs to reach the main restaurant.



Shortly later our food came out. Didn't get a photo of the full plate of these but we got empanadas as an appetizer. I got a lasagna because Clover didn't want to share a pizza so we were on our own.




Anika Rating: 8/10
It needed to go a bit easy on the cheese but other than that it was great! By the time we finished dinner the sun was starting to set so we made a mad dash towards the fort to catch a good view of the sun going down (we hadn't really gotten to see a clear view of the sunset since we'd gotten there), and lucky for us we caught it.








Once we saw the sun set we walked back to the car, seeing 2 statues of sheep curiously enough on our way back. It seemed like they were standing guards like statues of lions typically do. 

On our drive back we stopped by Jendy's one more time since we knew we'd be gone tomorrow night. The people there are all amazing and they recognized us when we walked in even though we'd only visited twice! This time I got a Hazelnut Chocolate ice cream.
Anika Rating: 9.7/10

Once we got home we started packing our bags so we'll be ready to check out tomorrow morning before we go back out to Old San Juan.

Thank you for reading.
















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