Eat. Travel. Do cool stuff.
During our time in La Paz, we’d been looking forward to making our way back up the Baja. The whole peninsula is dotted with small towns and stunning beach coves that we were excited to explore. In fairness, this area deserves a lot more time than we were able to give it!
Continue reading “Driving North through Baja”
Ever have the joy of going on an adventure that beats all of your expectations? That’s exactly what Centro de Trenes did for us.
I’m a big fan of going someplace from a vague recommendation that sounds like a fun adventure. There’s a restaurant at the end of a dirt road which itself is at the end of a long road that goes nowhere? Count me in!
Continue reading “Best Day Trip from La Paz, Mexico”
One of the most common questions we get from friends and family abroad is about how Baja is handling the COVID situation.
Continue reading “COVID in the Baja”
This post is a “guest” posting by Mr. Snacks, at the request of Mrs. Snacks.
Telecommunications while abroad has always been a bit of a pain point for us. Travelling abroad usually meant putting our phones on airplane mode when we got on the plane and leaving cellular service turned off for the duration of the trip. Yes, we could have paid the roaming charges, but they can get ridiculous when you travel as much as we do (or did) and it was usually only a minor inconvenience and a nice way to not be tempted to respond to work emails while on vacation. On the occasions where it rose to the level of being a major inconvenience, we’d turn on cellular on one of our phones, pay the ridiculous US carrier daily roaming fees, and then turn it off as soon as humanly possible.
On longer trips and assuming your phone is unlocked (which ours are), we could buy a local SIM card, but by swapping the SIM in your phone, you lose access to your US phone number over Wi-Fi Calling. That’s fine for a week or two trip, but when you are travelling for months it means either constantly swapping SIM cards in the device to see if you have messages from home, or risk missing voicemails like “Hey, I noticed water coming out the front door of your house – maybe you should have someone look into that?” or “Hi, this is Elon Musk, I’ve heard you are really great and would like to offer you a ton of money to work a hour a week, but I need to hear from you today”. I’ll decline to comment on which of those calls is more likely.
Continue reading “A new way to Cell Phone in Mexico”
Crossing the border was surprisingly easy. Even the part we heard the most horror stories about (not getting your FMM form stamped, and then getting beyond vehicle inspection and having issues getting back to the correct building to get it stamped) was quite simple since we were prepared. We arrived at the border at about 6:30am and were through all the pieces in 15 minutes. All of the officers were incredibly courteous and friendly.
Continue reading “Drivin’ and Kitin’”
It’s unbelievable to me to realize that I’ve been working on this crazy plan for almost 5 years: leave our jobs, and slow-travel extensively for a few years.
There’s been 100 steps in the process along the way including a lot of spreadsheets, travel research, having my Italian citizenship recognized, more spreadsheets, selling the house and even more spreadsheets. All of them have been part of the journey of getting us to this point, but a few steps feel more symbolic than others.
This week has felt like a biggie. This week both Mr Snacks and I are leaving our jobs.
The feelings are complicated. We’ve both been fortunate to have careers that have brought us a lot of fulfilment, and we are voluntarily walking away to take a lengthy break. But, we are leaving to travel! To do the mutual interest that brought us together! Travelling is literally at the heart of our “how did you meet” story. Still, we are leaving a lot of responsibility, accomplishment and work-friends behind with this decision. It makes it all bitter-sweet.
I have no doubt that our new lifestyle will give us a great perspective on different cultures, more time in nature (instead of stapled to a laptop), and time to explore new opportunities. On balance, I’m certain the move is the right one—just today it feels a tiny bit of sadness mixed with a scary amount of excitement.
So, now what?
We’ve got about a month before we start driving to Baja and a surprisingly lot to do. Finalize our Mexico vehicle insurance, de-winterize the van, mark out the cities to get gas in (this is only important in the Baja), stalk the weather for an appropriate window to leave, celebrate the holidays, pack for 3 months… Oh, and I’m sure Mr Snacks will want to leverage his new free time and our mountain location to ski every day possible!
Busy times ahead! But, it finally feels like this long-planned journey is about to start.
2020 is a year that has taught us all to be flexible. We are very fortunate that our family has stayed healthy and our biggest challenge that our travel plans have been upended.
It’s early September and according to the original plan Mr Snacks would be gainfully unemployed, we would have spent the summer in our mountain condo recuperating and be starting off on our international nomad adventure. Not surprisingly, selling a home during a global pandemic isn’t the best idea. What we thought would happen very quickly came to a screeching halt when we were instructed to stay home. With a mortgage to pay for an no place to go, it only made sense to keep working. We’ve just closed on the house, have shoehorned all of our stuff into our condo and are spending some time settling into mountain life. We’ve been hiking, biking and re-exploring our great state.
Continue reading “Feeling flexible”
I have always wanted to know another language. When I travel, I want to ask people about their lives, their jobs, their families. I’d like to be able to have a better conversation than “Need. Beer. Please”. While I took many years of French in high school and college, it keeps seeming that the language I need to use the most is Spanish. So, for the last few years I’ve been learning Spanish—mostly on my own, mostly using workbooks.
Continue reading “Getting Schooled. Spanish Schooled.”We stayed in Puerto Iguazu on the Argentina side for our hotel. Since the rest of our trip was within Argentina, the flights and logistics were just easiest to stay in Argentina—and the exchange rate didn’t hurt with that decision either!
We were there for only about 1 ½ usable days—and I wish we had had two full days. We spent our ½ day on the Argentina side, and the full day on the Brazil side. I chose this because I didn’t want to waste any of the ½ day going through the border, but did have some doubts at the time because so many say that there’s more to do at the Argentina side.
Continue reading “Visiting Iguazu Falls: Brazil & Argentina”