My husband and I got married back in August and we knew that we wanted to go somewhere warm, but does not break bank, for our honeymoon. I’ve always wanted to visit Puerto Rico ever since I missed out on going a few years ago when my former dance team went for a competition, which my husband (not at the time), went with his former team.

We bought our plane tickets a month after out wedding and my parents used their timeshare points to book our stay at Wyndham’s Rio Mar, Margaritaville location as their wedding present to us. The resort is located in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, which was an 11 minute drive from the El Yunque National Rain forest which was one of the top places to visit on our list.

My husband is the “go with the flow” type of person so no matter what I suggested, he was okay with it. This meant that I was responsible for “planning” or researching places to visit for our 1 week stay in the island. I quoted “planning” because let’s be honest, nothing goes according to plan when you’re on vacation, so I figured that it was best to just research places to visit and make a list and see what could fit into our days on the island.

Planning/Researching Places to Visit

Planning a trip is never easy, I know many would agree with me on that. After taking many trips with my family over the years and doing most of the planning, I grew tired of trying to plan our days where ever we went.

What I did differently this time is that I just spent most of my time researching places to visit whether if it was attractions, activities, or places to eat. Every time I found a place that I thought was interesting, I used Google Maps to save the location and created a new list “Honeymoon in PR.” This way, I could just look up a place and save it under that list, making my “planning” more convenient (can be seen in any device as long as you’re logged into Google).

Using Google Maps to create a list of places we want to visit was very convenient in many ways.
– you get a visual on how far each place are to one another, or from your stay. (shown above)
– just click on a saved place you want to go to and you can start your navigation right there.
– easy access to the places’ address and information (hours, photos, reviews, etc)
– easy way to share with others via a link

Now, for the actual research part, I read through A LOT of blogs about Puerto Rico, and watched a lot of travel vlogs on YouTube. In my personal opinion, I think it’s hard to just ask people for recommendations on where to go without doing the research because we all have different interests and it would be a waste of time if you go somewhere that was highly recommended by your aunt, and you end up not enjoying or getting anything out of it. DO YOUR RESEARCH!

I did find vlogs a little bit more useful than your regular blogs only because you get a better visual of the place as if you’re with the vlogger. Also, some of the vlogs you find on YouTube have places were not a lot of tourists know about, which is good if you’re looking for unique places to go to separate you from the crowd.

If you want to see or read about the places we visited, I will be posting another blog about it soon!