Are we there yet?

After spending an amazing summer in the Colorado mountains, we are ready for a little international travel! 

We’ve passed the summer doing as many sports as we can cram in—and even decided to learn rowing/sculling at Dillon Reservoir to mix things up.  What I can say is any minimal time on the rowing machine at the gym did absolutely zero in preparing me for the real sport!  You can’t just go get a cardio workout trying to go as hard as possible when you are worried about wobbling around in a very unstable boat and not wanting to swim in ice-cold waters.  Fortunately, we took lessons with the Frisco Rowing Center where we learned how to stabilize the boats (oddly enough, it’s mostly to do with holding your hands at a certain height), how to position your hands and wrists (oddly challenging to get this right), and how to put together the pieces of the stroke/recovery (not at all what I was doing when I was on the gym rowing machine!).  

The tough part and best part of rowing is the hours.  Especially in the mountains, you need to get out early before the winds pick up, and before the drunk pontoon boaters hit the water.  This means you are out on the water starting sometime between 6-7:30am.  Anyone who knows Mr Snacks will be aware this is not his favorite time of day—until we are sitting on lake with a glassy surface looking at an osprey with mountains in the background, then he’s very happy to be there.  We’ve really enjoyed the sport, and are sad to be leaving it to move on to other locations.  However, we both know that even though today it seems like summer will last forever, at this elevation big weather changes are bound to hit soon.  So, really, we’re probably only leaving with a few weeks left of real row-able weather.

We’ve also been able to cram in a ton of family and friend visits.  It does feel like we’ve been stockpiling a ton of socialization—will it be enough to keep us satiated for 6 months away?

In just a few short days, we’ll be heading out for more travel.  As with last year, our plan was carefully curated and then ripped up due to COVID changes.  A few times.  So, we’re just rolling with the changes.   

We’re off to San Juan, Puerto Rico; Panama City, Panama; Antigua, Guatemala; Oaxaca, Mexico; Mexico City and the Baja.  Some of the things that’ll be interesting experiments are that we are moving quite a bit more—never more than once per month, but far more frequently than La Paz. 

Also, we know quite a bit less about our destinations than we did with La Paz.  For La Paz, we’d actually done a scouting trip a year before to see if it was a destination worth spending a few months.  For this round, with so many changing factors all of my usual dreams of specific weather and several bucket list locations, we have several cities where we know almost nothing.  Food of Guatemala….um, I know nothing.  Culture of Panama….um, I hear they have a nifty canal?  Anything about Oaxaca…I know they have great food, and several people said we should go, but that’s really all I’m going on.  All this being said, I already have a few destinations where the month or so we have planned seems like it won’t be enough!  (I’m looking at you, Guatemala.)  Fingers crossed we leave places wanting more, as opposed to wishing we’d left 3 weeks earlier.

While we are lucky that every country is a Spanish speaking one, we’ll be learning about how frequently we prefer to change locations, a lot about each culture/food/history on the ground, and if going to destinations with minimal recon is a strategy for success or not.  We’ll also see how things go missing our first full holiday season.  While we’ve certainly missed a Christmas here or a Thanksgiving there, we’ve never been gone for the whole season.

And maybe the toughest, is that we need to pack for flying.  When we took the van, we had the luxury of being able to pack a little excessively.  Now we are forced to fit within the rules laid out by the airlines.  The last few days have involved paring stuff and practice weigh-ins.

I’m anxious to get out there! (Or maybe just anxious to be done packing…)  Are we there yet?