One more day in Cartagena

We just had to spend one more day in this beautiful city. This morning Maya said that yesterday was one of the best days of her life! And what's not to love about cobblestone streets and colonial buildings?





We toured the big fort today which offered great views of the area and best of all a network of tunnels connecting different areas of the fort. Super creepy, claustrophobic and fun!
















The heat in this city, especially at the top of the fort is about the most intense I have experienced. A lot like North Carolina turned up a few notches.




There's always a way to cool down, usually in the form of a street vendor selling icy cold cups of limeade. So good!



All three nights we have gone to the main plaza to watch these incredible dancers and musicians. Sure, they are there for the tourist, but they are really good and fun to watch!



Cartagena is a great city for a vacation. There is so much to do, see, and eat!



This vendor sells all kinds of empanadas and other fried savory things that I don't know the name of. His stand was especially popular because of the buckets of condiments available. You put a dollop of any kind of sauce on your empanada with each bite. We just stood there eating one after another with several other people.






We did quite a bit of walking and you can probably tell by Maya's posture that she was getting really tired. I could walk all day and soak up the atmosphere but the kids tire of it quickly and liken the experience to a forced march.



The view from the top of the city walls.



Cartagena is packed with tourists, some Europeans, but it mostly seemed like Colombians.



Our plan is to leave for Minca in the morning. We will make our way by taxi to the bus station and look for a bus to Santa Marta. The ride should be about 5 hours. From Santa Marta we take a shared car to the small mountain village of Minca, which is located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range which is the highest coastal mountain range in the world. Unbelievably, given the heat in Cartagena, the mountains are snow capped!

I heart Cartagena

Seriously I do! For someone who is always trying to find the most 'off the beaten path' destinations I have seriously fallen for the charm of Cartagena. Colonial balconies draped in Bougainvillea, traditional dancers in the plaza, cobblestone streets, horse drawn carriages. It's so perfect looking it doesn't even seem real.

We are staying at Hotel La Magdalena, it's not in the LP which is why there are no other backpacker types here. Just Colombians. We booked it through booking.com which was super easy. We are paying 42usd per night, and wee seem to have the nicest room in the place. It's clean, quiet, safe, the staff are super nice, and most important of all the room has AC. There are 6 single beds in the room so there is plenty of space.



Clean and quiet, just the way we like it. No backpackers and no DJ in the lobby.


For those of you who like to know what the facilities are like. The shower is a stream of cool water much like a hose attached thru the wall. But we dont really care.

We had a lovely first meal at Sabor Mulato yesterday afternoon.
















We had two fresh fish dishes, a pork dish, 3 fresh juices (pineapple, mango, and lulo) and a water for 19 usd. The food was delish. Lunch is our splurge meal. For breakfast and dinner we eat street food which saves us significant money.










Sausages, empanadas, and rice boiled in a corn husk for dinner cost 6 usd for all of us! Breakfast this morning was even better.




Two fresh strawberry juices, two coffees, and two chicken potato empanadas for 3 bucks. Muy bueno.

And of course these trips find us adopting an all you can drink soda attitude.






We are getting an early start this morning to be tourists. Usually we fly into the major city and get the heck out as soon as possible, but theres a bunch of cool things to see here so we are going to stay a day or so and then move on.

Preparing for Colombia

After months of indecision, we finally purchased tickets for our summer adventure. We are going to Colombia for three weeks. This was an agonizing process for me this year and I went round and round in my head and with friends about where to go.

Champagne problems indeed.





I write this post from my beautiful backyard hesitantly thinking that it's so nice right here! Why go anywhere? Why go through all the time, energy, and money to slog around Colombia for three weeks? Maybe I will know the answer to that when we get there.

Am I growing out of the need to travel? Is what I wanted for my life as a twenty something completely different from what I want for my life as a forty something? That really freaks me out because I have built a lifestyle and career around the concept of taking my family on mega international trips every summer. Why do I feel content to listen to the birds and admire my hydrangeas?

One theory I have is that by this time of the school year I am completely burned out and all I ever want to do is stare into space and veg out. A mistake I made this year was waiting until the last minute to decide. As the school year went on I became less and less interested in doing anything, especially mustering up all my senses to backpack. My son wanted to go back to the idyllic beaches of the DR, and I almost agreed....but I felt like that would be wimping out. Plus Luis said we hadn't been to enough places yet to start back tracking.

We wanted to go to Colombia last summer, after meeting people in Peru that said how great it was. But the kids were adamant that we go someplace relaxing, a place that wasn't like "work" as they said. And Peru was hard. The bus trips were epic and nauseous. City streets were crowded. I suspect Colombia won't be much different.

We have a route planned that will keep us away from big cities. We fly into Cartagena from Myrtle Beach. The tickets, including paying for carry on bags on Spirit Airlines, were 725 usd each. Not cheap at all, but definitely the best I found anywhere.

We made our first night hostel reservation at Hotel La Magdalena in Cartagena paying 41 usd. The next day we will head out on our loop to Minca, Valledupar, Mompos, and Tolu. I haven't decided if we will go to Minca or Tolu first though. On the back end of the trip in Cartagena we will certainly splurge on a room with a pool like we did last year.

So there you have it. Tickets purchased for Colombia!

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It's nearly time

It's getting close!  In a few weeks the year will have turned and I will feel justified in beginning to think about and plan where we will go this summer.  The planning and dreaming will sustain me as I climb the last weeks to the peak of the school year.

That's the problem with winter break, it feels like the midway point and it should be the half way mark of the school year, but it isn't.  It is actually the hell that is the last few paces as I crawl, on bloodied knuckles over jagged rocks littered with the bodies of the fallen,  to the summit of misery.  Its the time where I am certain I will not survive the weeks and months ahead.  Its where I cry for no reason, slam doors, laugh at inappropriate times, render myself generally ineffective, embarrass myself with my cynical attitude,  and wonder what good can come of my life.

Yup.  It really is that bad folks.  I'm sorry if you feel bad for me.  Don't.  I choose this career for the sole purpose of being able to travel.  Any other profession would give me a measly 2 weeks vacation a year.  There isn't anything in this world I would ever want to do for work 50 weeks of the year.  I don't even like work.  I do what I have to do until I can pack a few changes of clothes and a good book in a backpack and go off as far away as my budget will allow.

But back to that planning.  School can be made just bearable enough when I think about castles and train trips in Romania or jungles and river trips in Colombia- two places that are top on the list.  They were top last year too but the DR won out to make the kids happy.  And I had a way better time than I thought in the DR.  In fact, I would go back if there weren't so many other places I wanted to go!

Asia tops the list, Malaysia specifically.  But the plane tickets alone would eat the entire budget for the trip.  So we stick to South and Central America.  Not complaining!

What do you mean, Day 7?

That's what I said to myself when at our staff meeting today when our administrator gave us a reality check by reminding us that it was only day 7 of the school year. So why was I sitting there feeling like it had been 7 months already? Really, when she said it was day 7 it was like I was in an underwater tunnel dream. No, really? It just can't be.

And so now here I am up way too late on a school night trolling the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree for some tidbits about far away places, and already dreaming up where we will go next summer which is fully 10 months away.

Planning the trips is an escape from reality for me, gives me a life preserver to hold on to. But I have travel on the brain because I have been going to my 7th grade classrooms to do my "hi I am your guidance counselor" dog and pony show. I start my Prezi with a question "where in the world did I go this summer?". I gave them a few hints like a map of the DR and a photo collage from our trip. They seemed to have fun guessing where we went, and were predictably grossed out when I told them how many changes of clothes we bring for a month on the road.

So it's Day 7.

Of 185.

Way to early to start counting down the days until I am on the road again.

But not to early to get lost in researching the perfect out of the way places for us to go!

Post trip angst

So my usual post summer trip angst is lasting a little longer than usual, probably because I have been obsessing over family travel web sights like www.familyvagabond.org. Among other things, this website profiles the many families who have forsaken a predicable and tethered life for a nomadic lifestyle, oftentimes undertaking journeys with no planned termination.

Does my infatuation indicate a desire for this life for my own family or am I just being nostalgic?

Flashback to spring 1992. It was all about acquiring my very own VCR and a 19 inch TV. I had just graduated from the University of Michigan with a useless degree in psychology which I put to work in a halfway house for women who were dually diagnosed. Luis, fresh from the Coast Guard, was making pizzas at a popular local place. We were 22 years old and ready to settle in to an uneventful life in the Midwest. Then I had one of those conversations that end up steering life in a completely different direction.

One of my very best friends, Sean, had recently made the move from the midwest to San Francisco. When I shared my excitement about getting my share of the American dream he did not congratulate me. Instead he was very blunt, he said I was going to get stuck in the Midwestern rut and never get out. It gave me pause, because this was a familiar story to me, a story that haunted me in it's somber regret. It is my own mother's tale from the mid 1960's, of how she was going to break free of plans and conventions. Her plan was to get in her car and just drive out of Detroit, to leave her predictable life behind, head west on I 94 and see where it would lead her with no plan or end point in sight. Two hours out of the city she decided to turn back, changing the course of her life forever. The heavy feeling of regret sinks in heavy on my chest as I recall this story, I remember the look on her face and the mourning in her eyes as she mused over this one life's chance she did not take.

Motivated by the fear of getting stuck in the Midwest forever and the fear of not wanting to have the same regrets as my mother, I proposed to Luis that we move out west, to San Francisco. We could sleep on sean's floor until we figured out what we were going to do. He really didn't have to think about it, and it surprised me how easily he agreed. I guess he figured he had nothing to lose. He had severed his Long Island, NY roots when he joined the coast guard and his military stint gave him a taste for adventure and travel. He was easily sold on the idea. By summer we had gotten rid of most of the things we accumulated while he was stationed in Port Huron, MI and I was a student in Ann Arbor. We packed up the Nissan Sentra and got on the road.

It was liberating, exciting, and felt so very right. We didn't know it then, but our decision to pack up and leave the midwest began a nomadic and rootless period of our lives that are a constant reference point and testament to the benefits of selling all your stuff and hitting the road.

Hoarders and Vagabonds

With all this free time on my hands and paralyzing indecision about what to do with it led to a hoarders episode marathon over the weekend. If you have never seen an episode of hoarders it is crazy. I have never been so motivated to clean, sort, and purge in my life. Courtesy of Netflix I watched at least a dozen episodes over the course of two days.

This is the result:



The iPad camera could not capture the true number of bags of crap I gleaned from the room of my two children, there are several that are not shown in this picture. The kids and I worked for eight hours on Sunday and could not believe what has accumulated...over the past year! We did the same haul out last summer and we were amazed then too.

Besides watching hoarders for hours, I spent a lot of time cruising websites of families who had sold all their stuff to begin a family adventure of world travel, calling themselves nomadic families. I was simultaneously feeling superior to the hoarders and inferior to these vagabond family travelers and their cool name which spawned a full day or purging my house, beginning with the kids rooms. Because if I'm not going to have a nomadic family, well at least I can clean out my house like they do and by god at least I won't be a hoarder!

The other thing that motivated the clean out was realizing, yet again, that when you can live for several weeks out of a backpack with not much more than three changes of clothes, a few books, and a toothbrush, well, the average American child's room can feel a bit overwhelming. There was stuff coming out of our ears!

The clincher came when my daughter was in tears over how small her room was and how she needed more space. I looked around, and with the wisdom of those psychologists on the hoarders show fresh in my brain I said girl, you don't need more space you need less stuff. And that started the cleaning binge which resulted in the enormous pile in the foyer. Lucky for me my children were also motivated to clean out the stuff so there were no battles to fight.

The kids are going to have a yard sale this weekend. I have no doubt that they will use that money to buy more stuff.