After an incredibly busy year, I told my friend and travel buddy, Jess, in November that we should plan a mini getaway soon. She’s a travel agent and an action taker, so I knew if I put it out there to her, something would happen. Within weeks, we were on a plane to Puerto Rico, where we met up with my friend, Kate, to stay in the Marriott Stelaris.
I tried something totally different for this trip. I usually pack up my full DSLR for travel, but since I’ve been playing with film, I challenged myself to only take my Nikon F100 with Fuji 400h film. It’s manual everything, even focus.
I didn’t take a ton of photos—I really wanted to spend my time there connecting with my dear friends and recharging. In a strange twist of fate, I decided to only take photos on my phone when we hiked out to go swimming in a waterfall, and my phone ended up with a strange error that made all of the photos show up gray. So I guess old school film really won out on this trip.
And yes, I did in fact pick this hotel out of the options Jess presented because it had a water slide. I went down it more times than I can count, because I’m basically a twelve year old 🙂
I should also mention that if you make your way to San Juan, Puerto Rico, Old San Juan is an amazing area to check out. It’s the second oldest European-established capital city in the Americas (founded in 1521).
I discovered acai bowls at a little cafe down the road from our hotel, and I’m pretty sure that I was there at least three or four times in the less than four days that we were in Puerto Rico. I was instantly obsessed with these things—it was topped with fresh fruit and bee pollen (Jeff still makes some fun of me for the bee pollen, but I’m telling you—that thing was amazing). When I got home, I immediately looked into how I could make these for myself, and I’ve been starting my day with one more and more often.
