 Hi there, I am Sandy Alnach and I returned recently from a trip to Puerto Rico where I stayed at the gallery in Old San Juan and I thought I would share a little bit about it with you and I'll tell you why in just a few minutes. This is coming in the entrance. There's a locked gate behind me as well as a few parking spaces out front. Since parking is at a premium, that's a good perk to have for staying at the gallery in. They have courtyards everywhere at this place for just sitting and enjoying yourself. There are birds that live out here, lots of parrots all over the place. There's fountains all over. And as you come into the lobby area, you check in and you can get your key each time you come and go. They keep your key for you so you don't lose it while you're out in the city and doing your thing, which is nice. They have someone there 24-7 to let you in. And panning around the lobby area itself gives you a flavor of what it feels like in this place. It's owned by artist Jan DeSopo. She's a well-known artist here and in lots of different areas. She's known a lot for her bronze work, but she also is a painter and sculptor and all kinds of things, many mediums. The artwork here is either her artwork or student artwork or other artworks that she has purchased. And this one I loved. It was like three-dimensional birds coming out of the painting on the wall. It made me smile every time I walked by it. Everywhere you look, there is something to inspire you. Everywhere is eye candy, whether it's the framed art on the walls or the types of books that she keeps around everywhere, and you can sit and peruse through, to the cobblestones and the textures on the walls and the colors and the paint and everything. This is just outside of my room and it's a courtyard that's open to the outside and all of these paintings are under a protected overhang, but it actually rained right out here, right in front of my door, which was kind of cool. So this is my door. You can see how old that is and going in, you see my unmade bed of course, but this is the room called print. Each one has a different name. This used to be her apparently print studio at one time and it feels like staying in a castle, like the textures on the walls and the floors and everything, the furniture that's in here. There's a double bed and a twin bed in here and I have two bathrooms. One has the shower and a sink and the other has a shower sink and toilet in it and they have the little stairs that go up into this little area. The entire place used to be, I think, five family homes that they joined together and made into the whole gallery in. My windows overlook a pool. Is that not the most beautiful pool you've ever seen? It's just amazing. The water's a little cold, but it's refreshing on a hot day. And a hot day here is kind of every day. It's like an 85-ish temperature and it's a little on the muggy side, but there's always an ocean breeze. So it's kind of a, you know, a really nice, comfortable, warm place to come. I left my windows open a lot and left the ceiling fans going, but there is air conditioning too. And sometimes I would turn that on if I was a little sweaty and overheated, but for the most part I just liked having that ocean breeze coming into my windows. So now we're going to walk out past the kitchen area where they serve the breakfast and go upstairs into the area that's overlooking the pool so you can get an idea of what that's like. It's another of the many seating areas. Lots of beautiful plants. Some plants flowered in the morning, some in the afternoon. And one of the things that I wanted to bring all of this to you for is to let you know that I plan to do an artist retreat here in January or February of 2019. And I wanted to give you time to save up your pennies. So ask for money for Christmas and any other holidays, birthdays and things from now until then so that you can join in on the trip. You can go to the gallery in its website to get an idea of the pricing. She does apparently have some artist pricing that she'll do, so if we do an artist retreat we might get a discount on that. Those are my windows up there. And I did sit down here in this area down below so I could paint the birds when they put the birds up on these two perches on the wall. So you may have seen those on Instagram. But I'm really looking forward to doing a trip out here. I want to bring people to see this beautiful island and experience it for yourself and the beautiful people who are here. I have never been treated so kindly in any place as Puerto Rico. I went all over the island. Our retreat will probably be mostly in San Juan or old San Juan. But the island people here are just amazing. They treated me with such grace and it was a delight to be here and I can't wait to go back. So we're going to go up past the lobby again. We're going to turn up these stairs and go up to the terrace. And the terrace is at the top. It's the highest point in old San Juan so we can get a good view. But I also wanted to give you an idea of the rigor of the trip because there are a lot of stairs in this place and I do want to do some things upstairs in the upper levels of this building as well as going out into the city. We'll be doing mostly sketching. I'm going to do some watercolors so you can bring your watercolors with you. If you're just someone who does sketching alone, this trip will be perfect for you. If you want to do some watercolors, well, we'll do some of that. But sketches will be quicker and I want to get more in. So I want to have more time to see more things and since we can do sketches more quickly then we're going to focus on doing probably a little bit more of that. I don't know completely yet but we'll see how that goes. And I'll be letting you know more details as time goes on. Going up these stairs, imagine hauling all of your backpack full of your art supplies up with you and if you bring an easel then you got that to haul to. Have good knees when you come but just the way every room is set up is different. Each room feels a little different. This one is like a scrapbook room where there's all these wonderful old newspaper articles framed on the walls which is really cool. And then we go out here onto another courtyard with more seating areas. So I'm picturing having small groups of people get together and sit and do some sketching together. This could be really fun. I can't wait. And then down here there's another area to sit and enjoy the ocean air. When you're on these lower courtyards there's a little less of the torrential breeze because up on the very top level you'll hear that the wind does pick up the higher you go because there's less to block it. So some of those lower ones are a little bit less blustery. You can see we are right near the ocean. We're not on the ocean so it's not one of those chips where you're going to be hanging out on the beach in your bikini all the time. Nobody wants to see me in one but we're going to have that fresh ocean breeze all the time and it's probably going to be possible to arrange a trip to a beach for a day during the trip if that's something that the folks on the trip want to do. So a lot of it will be customized to who decides that they're going to come. So we'll come to some group decisions about what we want to do and what we want to draw while we're there. So you can see the beauty of living on the ocean in an old city like this. Just gorgeous. When we're walking around in old San Juan you're going to be inspired by the colors on the buildings and the architecture that's here. There's just so much to see and do and enjoy and be inspired by. And I am also going to be selling all of my watercolors that I did while I was there as well as more than I'm going to be creating in the next couple of weeks. So later on this summer stay tuned for an announcement about doing an online auction of all of the paintings to raise money for charities that are helping out here in Puerto Rico. And I'll give you more details about all that as time goes on as well. So if you're interested in the trip I'm going to write up a blog post with a little more details on it and a little more of my plans and you can see the link for that in the description down below. And otherwise I will see you guys later on. Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. Ta ta!