Puerto Rico | The reason I took three weeks off during wedding season

Florida and Puerto Rico

This blog post has been stashed for the last four weeks. After returning from vacation, wedding season continued and I’ve been working since then. However, today, I felt the need to finish it as my beautiful island of Puerto Rico has gone through a catastrophic natural disaster.

Hurricane Maria has swept my beautiful soil. There is no power in this island of 3.5 million Puerto Ricans, rivers flow on the streets where my family walks every day, homes are completely flooded up to the roof, and there is a lot of grieve. My heart is heavy for the island and the people I love. As of tonight, I have not heard anything from my family and friends back home. I’ve called and only a voicemail is what I get to hear. I feel frustrated and anxious, not being able to help makes it worse. I can, from afar, simply hope to receive news of my grandparents and family members. Material things are just that, but lives are precious. So to detox of all the anxiety, I decided to finish and publish my Vacation post. Here is to Blog Therapy.

Update: Thursday, September 21st at 2:30pm – I still have not heard from anyone back home. Not my grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncle but also my from my husband’s family. We keep calling and will update.

Our Vacation

Life is busy. We may tend to go through the day with daily task and meaningless problems. We may even live for the weekend or for that yearly vacation we are saving our pennies for. I can tell you I am usually busy and tend to occupy myself with a thousands things. They are compiled of my amazing job and my amazing children and husband. Together it doesn’t leave me time for much, except the random night of binge Netflix watching on an intriguing show.

I can shamefully say that it’s been a good 6 years since I’ve taken a vacation. Sure, I have taken the kids to a weekend giveaway and even done the lazy summer thing with them but to actually go on vacation, I haven’t. Last year, the kids and the hubby went on vacation by themselves because I had weddings galore and couldn’t go. This year, mainly due to my grandfather’s failing health, I decided to block my calendar and go on a three week journey to see family and explore the island that saw me as a little kid, Puerto Rico.

This is my journey in pictures.

By far, not my best technical work but perhaps the most treasured. And yes, I am aware my kids are hairy monsters. They are allowed not to have haircuts during Summer Break.

First Stop

We first drove to Florida to visit my mom, brother and niece. Twelve hours of pure bliss. It was actually much better than I expected. The kids watched movies, played electronics, read, had snacks what it seems to be every five minutes and complained once or twice when Daddy and I wanted to stop at South of the Border. I only spent 3 days here. It was to be a whole week but with my grandfather’s illness, I had to move dates around to be able to spent time with them back in Puerto Rico.