Looking Forward 2016

Looking Forward 2016

Here's a hint to one of our adventures in late October...and a rare sighting of our photographer!

Here's a hint to one of our adventures in late October...and a rare sighting of our photographer!

So what's up for 2016? 

January: Portland ME &  Burlington VT

The Spirit of Ethan Allen rests on Lake Champlain for the winter, but there is plenty going on Burlington VT in the winter!

The Spirit of Ethan Allen rests on Lake Champlain for the winter, but there is plenty going on Burlington VT in the winter!

Sometimes family business takes you places, sometimes business-business takes you places. I think what distinguishes the people I know who seem to always have adventures in travel from people who have to go on business trips,  is that they have the unique ability to see every trip (no matter how mundane it might seem) as an adventure.  We try to travel that way too, and turned two recent trips, one to Portland ME for a wedding and one to Burlington VT for family business into mini adventures.  Some places might not seem very interesting when your boss sends you someplace that doesn't involve swaying palm trees, but really, every place has things that make it interesting!  The key to making a business trip an adventure is trying to find those things that make a place unique and doing the things that locals do and enjoying them! 

February: Azamara Cruise through Panama Canal and Costa Rica

A traditional colorful oxcart in Costa Rica

A traditional colorful oxcart in Costa Rica

February's adventure's  will start with an Azamara Journey cruise from Miami through the Panama Canal to Costa Rica.  We are excited to take our first cruise on Azamara, especially since it just launched form a complete refurbishment yesterday!  Azamara recently Facebook posted out several photos of the "re-imagined" ship, and I'm looking forward to our cruise.  (see their post here) With upgraded internet on board, I'm looking forward to exploring the ship myself and to posting and tweeting live!  Our cruise was booked with one of our favorite travel agencies, Travel Beyond, who are unfailingly patient with us and our very specific requests when planning trips in Africa and Latin America.  

Our itinerary starts in Miami, with a weekend in South Beach, and then a few sea days to explore the ship.  We will arrive in Cartegenga, Colombia and have arranged a privately guided group to explore one of South and Latin America's best preserved Spanish colonial cities. After another day at sea, we will approach the Panama Canal from the Caribbean to the Pacific.  Once we arrive in Panama City, we have another private tour guide engaged to take us around the city and travel out to see the new locks. (those new Panamax locks were scheduled to open in 2016, but problems have pushed that back).  After leaving Panama City, our cruise goes to Costa Rica, where we will explore the Golfo Dulce and Golfito with an independent tour arranged through Costa Rica Expeditions.  After disembarking, we will spend 4 days on the Osa Peninsula exploring Corcovado National Park and the beautiful Pacific Ocean. We visited Costa Rica in 2007, but did not get an opportunity to explore this part of the country, and we look forward to sharing a full report when we get back! (2007 Costa Rica Trip Reports here) (and here)

February/March: Florida

Bird life in Southwest Florida is always fascinating!

Bird life in Southwest Florida is always fascinating!

Family business once again takes me to Florida. I'll find a way to make visits with relatives and friends interesting and hope to share more information about the area, especially the wonderful opportunities to bike, hike, kayak and bird watch!

 

May: Niagara Falls?

More family business!?  Yup, this time moving a student out of an apartment in upstate New York.  There are plenty of interesting places to explore, but I hope to steal a few days to see Niagara Falls and post a trip report here. 

June: Europe?

Students with time to travel in the summer, might send us to Great Britain. 

Students with time to travel in the summer, might send us to Great Britain. 

With college students free to travel in the summer, I am trying to make some plans to go to Europe, but trying to get college students to plan ahead is like trying to catch smoke!  I'm hopeful I can travel with the young folks, then set them free on the continent to explore while I do some writing about what Europe looks like this summer. Will it be quiet with folks staying home because of terror threats, or will it become a bustling bargain this summer?  I hope to "go see" for myself!

July/August/September:  Maine

Maine blueberry barrens

Maine blueberry barrens

I always enjoying sharing about the state of Maine!  (despite not being a native, you could say I'm a Maine-iac!) Jeff's photographs only hint at the beauty of this far north state.  In the summer the days are long, and light is perfect...we will post plenty of photos and share some of our favorite people (GoSeeIt People) and places!  

 

October/November Churchill, Manitoba

Did you guess it?

For his birthday this year,  I surprised Jeff with a bucket list trip to Churchill in Canada to see and photograph the polar bears.  I  worked with Expedition Trips to plan a Natural Habitat Polar Bear Adventure. Expedition Trips is on Wendy Perrins WOW list, (which if you need a specialist travel agent, is a great place to start!) and we are working with ET because we have a couple of polar adventures on our wander list, and we hope to get comfortable with this travel agent before planning much longer trips to the Arctic and Antarctica. It's not often I get to surprise Jeff, and it's even less often I get HIM in front of the camera!  We really look forward to this trip, and hope to share some amazing photos of polar bears, dog sledding and maybe even northern lights!

It's an ambitious plan- and you know what they say about plans- we make them and God laughs! But without plans, it's too easy to forget to make every day an adventure, no matter where we find ourselves! Happy Travels!

In addition to regularly adding Trip Reports and Planning and Packing Tips and opinion (Just Thinking Out Loud) pieces, one big goal for 2016 is to engage more with readers and make content easier to search and access.  It means learning a little better how to organize content and connect with folks on Square Space (our site host)  and testing to make sure it works!! I also plan to continue digging into the archives to post past trip reports. And I plan to increase our GoSeeIt, People! interviews to one per month. (our first one was our friends Lisa's New Years Eve in NYC. Contact us if you've been somewhere neat or done something cool, or live somewhere interesting (And remember, I think ALL places are interesting!) in other words, we would LOVE to interview you!! 

Where We've Been and Where We Are Going

Jeff has a running joke about me...that I'm not happy unless I have at least 3 trips booked at any given time!  And I'm embarrassed to say, he's not wrong!  Last year I traveled to the Florida and the Bahamas on Enchantment of the Seas with my mother and teen daughter. In September and October, Jeff and I traveled to Eastern Europe and Danube River cruise on AmaPrima, and we took a college visit trip to Minnesota. So it seems there is always a trio (or more!) of trips to pack for each year. But I would argue (and I do!) that this because we take a very programmatic approach to fitting in the destinations we want into an already really busy life, and generally, we plan travel well in advance. 

With short vacation times, and our usually aggressive plans to see and do a lot in that short time, we like to book trips early to have plenty of time for planning and to ensure we get our first choice of all the components we want. The best hotels, cruise cabins or guides can book up even a year in advance!  We almost always book our trips a year or more in advance.

That all changed this year!

{People with more time, and fewer responsibilities can afford to wait it out and see what specials might pop up last minute.  You can get some good deals, but usually only on trips or components that for some reason didn't sell well in the first place (think cruises during hurricane season, or hotels that might be a little down at the heels or a destination off season)  If you don't mind making those kinds of compromises to save some money; waiting till the last minute is a great way to get a good value.}   

 

Sunset from the Grandeur of the Seas; wondering about that distant Island!

Sunset from the Grandeur of the Seas; wondering about that distant Island!

Cuba

For years, when we've cruised the Caribbean from Florida, and I've always looked out the window on our sea days as we passed by Cuba, and been fascinated about this place.  After all, the place we just left- Miami, throbs with energy and music of a huge Cuban American population there. What is the island they left like now?  It's another of the world's politically complicated place, but our travel philosophy has always been that going to a place and learning about it, meeting the people (if that can be done safely) is the best way to learn about the differences and make an informed opinion.  I knew that for years an embargo trade and travel in Cuba had left citizens of the US on the outside, and people in Cuba unable to share the stories of their lives with us.  In 2000, some limited travel on "people to people" exchanges was allowed by the US government for the reasons I mention above, but they were discontinued in 2003, and resumed again in 2011. Ever since sailing by (at quite a distance to stay in International Waters) and seeing the lights glittering on Cuba and miles of undeveloped beaches, I imagined what it might be like to visit there.  

I put a "people to people" tour to Cuba on my list, when the licenses started being offered, but having at least 3 trips booked already, I didn't exactly have a "spot" on the calendar for a trip to Cuba.  But we wanted to fit in a short trip, between other travel we had planned.  At the time I had trouble finding an operator that offered a shorter trip; several were island tours lasting 10-15 days. (Overseas Adventure Travel, National Geographic, Natural Habitat, Roads Scholar, Friendly Planet etc) That's a luxury of time we didn't have, so I put it off and other trips made the top our list.  Our daughter almost traveled there with a high school group (and we were angling to find a way to latch onto that trip- after providing some pretty good photos of a prior student exchange, we were hopeful the lure of Jeff's photos might convince the teachers to let us join as chaperons!) but the tour company the school planned to use failed to secure the necessary license and that trip was cancelled. 

On December 21st, President Obama announced the normalization of relations with Cuba.  Politically, it will be debated, but one thing that will not be debated is that a change in US policy will mean changes for Cuba. Eventually, I imagine, US based Caribbean cruise ships will make regular ports of call in Cuba, and I will likely set foot there many times in the future.  But the announcement increased the urgency for us to see Cuba now before it changes!  This thought was confirmed when I called Insight Cuba to ask about their trips.  The representative, who has spent considerable time in Cuba, explained that her friends there could not wait to sell those old 1950s cars and buy modern ones! And I can just imagine the American antique car market salivating over those old cars coming into Miami via barge!  While we talked she confirmed my feelings that things are and will be changing in Cuba and NOW is the time to go to have a sense of that change when when I step off a cruise ship into Habana 10 years from now!

Less than 6 months to do my research!

Less than 6 months to do my research!

So, we did something completely uncharacteristic for us!  We booked a trip less than 6 months away!! (only 6 months to plan- how will I cope!?!)  In June 2015, we will take Insight's Jazz in Havana tour. Insight offers people to people tours with guides and all the appropriate licenses. It's under the umbrella of a development organization that uses all the profits from the Cuba trips to pay for volunteer travel to other locations across the globe where they do development work.   It is only 5 nights, so fits perfectly in our schedule. The Jazz in Havana trip with visits to art galleries and museums, artists homes, and meetings with jazz musicians in Havana night clubs, is perfect for our daughters; a saxophone player and a design student.  Jeff is already salivating over the photographic opportunities, and I am looking forward to practicing my Spanish, dancing and meeting Cubans for myself in their home!

Cuba seen from the Navigator of the Seas

Cuba seen from the Navigator of the Seas

So...what about the other 2 trips Jeff insists I must have booked? Well, there might be more than 3 booked now!  I have plans to travel to Florida next week and hope to blog live how to find "real Florida" among all the man made tourist attractions!  In April we will be sailing Adventure of the Seas from San Juan Puerto Rico, visiting Barbados, Antigua, St Marteen, St Lucia, and St Croix. Lastly, we've booked passage on the Azamara Journey from Miami to Cartegna, Columbia, through the Panama Canal and along the Pacific coast of Costa Rica in early 2016.