After a long rainforest hike, we stopped by a kiosk for a batida, a milkshake kind of thing made with fresh fruit.  Mubby offered Miles a drink of hers.  He nearly drained it and handed it back to her with about a centimeter remaining.

M:  I don’t want it.

I enjoy a good vacation for a lot of reasons, and I especially enjoy a Caribbean vacation because of how much I love ocean swimming.  I realize not everybody shared that joy.  In talking to others, it seems common for people to feel like the ocean is scary and overwhelming and unpredictable.  I can see that, I guess, but whenever I’m in there, I feel so calm and happy.  Darth Vader agrees, I think.  Every time we swim (which has been twice a day so far, since Miles sides with me on the ocean debate), the kicks and stretches in my belly stop.  I assume it’s because he’s lulled by the sounds and movement in the sea.  I imagine it’s a lot like an amplified version of the general in-utero environment.  The waves probably sound like my circulatory system, and the movements are a gentler version of the movements I make every day, minus the jarring lunges I sometimes make around Miles.

Heck, maybe that’s why I like ocean swimming so much.  It’s a primeval, fetal kind of experience.  The beach has been lovely in the mornings and early afternoons, though not so much in the evenings when the tide comes in and lots of seaweed globs around.  Maybe I could just pretend that’s a placenta or something.

Okay, I had planned this to be a food post, so here we go.  I don’t have much for still food photos, but I did get video of the most visually impressive meal to date, so I’ll update later with evidence.

The first night we got in, it was late and we were tired, so we stayed in Palmas for dinner.  Palmas del Mar is a strange beast.  It’s sometimes called a resort, but it’s not the all-inclusive hotel kind of resort.  It’s really more like a big complex with lots of condo buildings, each of which has its own name.  There are also golf courses and tennis courts, but that’s not really on our agenda this time around.  Palmas has a couple of commercial areas with restaurants, so we went to Blue Hawaii the first night and got some expensive but high-quality Chinese food.  That’s been our experience in Palmas–eating at the resort is expensive, but we haven’t had a bad meal yet.  That’s better than paying way too much for crappy food.

The second day we hit a Tex Mex place, where my dad and I had Puerto Rican tacos.  They were really interesting.  I don’t know what you call the shell part, but it was a hollow little bread thing made with coconut.  It was available with a variety of fillings.  My dad got octopus and chicken, and I got shrimp and pork.

We’ve also been doing a good amount of cooking and eating here at the condo, which is nice both for finances and for getting stuff to please Miles.  He’s done a good job so far—he likes rice a lot, and that’s pretty ubiquitous,  but it’s good for him to have some fruits and vegetables for snacking.  He’s also a convert to Bimbo cookies.

Our most exciting meal yet was at Casa Rustik, a pretty authentic-seeming little place where we were the only gringos.  We drove a ways down highway 3 and parked on a sidewalk, but it actually wasn’t too hard to find.  Denny, my mom and I all got mofongo, which was a big pile of mashed and seasoned plantains stuffed with meats.  They got pork and I got crab.  My dad got a very impressive whole fried fish (chillo, I think the waitress said) in ajillo sauce.  It was a lot of food and we all got very full.  Miles liked the bathroom because they had blue soap.

I’m not sure what’s on tap for the rest of the week, but I’ll re-update later.  There are many more photos on Flickr.

P.S. Denny is more of a pool guy.

For those who haven’t seen them elsewhere (each video is about 1:30)…

Miles has fun with various California-based relatives, notably Cousin Lisa (puppet show auteur):

[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/aprille/4800632892/[/flickrvideo]

Adventures in San Francisco, including a mildly offensive hat for Miles and a whap in the face for Mubby:

[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/aprille/4781216139/[/flickrvideo]

Our trip to Monterey:

[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/aprille/4780235310/[/flickrvideo]

Denny and Aprille and lots of whales:

[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/aprille/4778547111/[/flickrvideo]

When I am about to travel somewhere, I like to read a book set in that location so I can get a feel for it.  It’s also fun to do things and see places referenced in the book.  Right now I’m reading Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, which takes place largely in the Bahamas (although I’m currently in the Cuba section).

It’s good insofar as I always enjoy Hemingway.  I like how he says what he means, and I think he really accurately captures the brutality of human interaction (in both good and bad ways).  I’m only about halfway through it, but thus far, the book is a bit of a downer.  Hemingway wrote it at the end of his life, around his suicide, so I guess that makes sense, but thus far the themes seem to be failure, desertion, disappointment, and death.

A Moveable Feast, which I read shortly before and during my trip to Paris, was a whole lot more upbeat.  The Sun Also Rises, which I think remains my all-time favorite book, takes place partly in San Sebastian.  I read that before I went there for the first time. It has its ups and downs.

Maybe I need to find a less-moody favorite author.

So, an update on that internal debate I was having a while back about vacation destinations:

We decided on the Bahamas, specifically Grand Bahama Island.  It’s not, like, undiscovered by any means, but it’s somewhat less frequented than New Providence (where Nassau and Paradise Island are), especially in the low/shoulder season.  It’s still easy to reach—just one connection in Atlanta—and we hope it will be a nice combination of exotic and not too challenging.

We’ll be renting a condo rather than staying at a hotel.  We’ve had good luck with this model in both Rome and Norway, so we’re hoping to go 3-for-3.  In our experience, renting a condo or apartment is cheaper and more spacious than a hotel room, plus there’s none of that awkward tipping expectation that you get in a resort.  Plus I think the money goes more directly into the local economy (thought that’s debatable in this case, since the condo we’re getting is owned by Californians).  At any rate, we’ll be buying groceries in local stores and stuff.  I get tired of eating out all the time on vacation, so it’ll be good to have some cereal and sandwich stuff to have around, then we can go out for dinners.

I’m psyched about the condo.  Check out the view from the living room:

More details on the condo.

In equally exciting news, I’m flying for free.  We picked Delta just because they could get us there with only one connection, which is good when there’s a little dude involved.  As it happens, they’re merging with Northwest, and it ended up being quick and painless to transfer my Northwest FF miles to Delta, and I had enough for a free ticket.  I think that earned me a lobster dinner, don’t you?

Here’s a cool effect for your landscapey-type photos.  It makes them look like miniatures.

This is from Saint Josef in Montréal, which is quite large.

You can do it, too.

Thanks, Mark.

I’ve got this white middle class guilt situation going on with regard to Mexico.

Or, more specifically, resorty, Mayan Riviera-type Mexico, which perhaps I ought to refer to as “Mexico.”

I have never in my life been the kind of person who would stay in a resort.  Having never been to a resort, I guess I’m not exactly sure what that kind of person is, since I’ve never seen them in their natural habitat, but I imagine them as people who want to visit an exotic land without ever seeing any poverty or doing anything slightly inconvenient.  I was all about “authentic” travel, which I defined as doing things like staying at small, locally-owned hotels or renting apartments in actual neighborhoods, making a valient attempt at speaking the language, that kind of thing.

One time I even went to actual Mexico, as opposed to “Mexico.”  My cousin and I went with a person we knew from Cuernavaca and stayed his family.  It was super fun.  We went places a couple of güeras probably wouldn’t have gone, ate interesting things, and had a generally good (and informative) time.

I was extremely conscientious about not drinking the water.  I never had drinks with ice in them, I kept my mouth clamped shut in the shower, and I even rinsed out my toothbrush with bottled water.  I still got the runs.

For that reason, I’ve kind of avoided Mexico since then.  There are so many other places in the world to see with so much natural and cultural splendor.  Many of them would require similar vigilance for my tender gringa gut, but many of them do not (c.f., all of Europe, Puerto Rico and many other parts of the Caribbean, Costa Rica).

I need a beachy-type vacation.  The last time I saw the ocean was a year and a half ago at my cousin’s wedding in Sarasota, and while that was lots of fun, it didn’t scratch my itch for tropical fish viewing.  I am also for the first time considering a resort.  Adventure travel is great, but now that Miles is in my life, everything is about twelve times more complicated.  I suddenly feel a lot less stuck-up toward people who want to take the easy route and just relax on their vacations.  I did some research and was feeling good about the Cayman Islands.

But then I read about and saw pictures from a friend’s trip to Mexico.  She assured me that she didn’t get sick.   It’s so close by, it’s so reasonably priced, it’s so easy to fly there.  There are some resorts that have gotten really good reviews and purport to be family-friendly.  But is it exploitive to go to Mexico and just do lite travel?  Miles is probably still too young to really be swayed, but I don’t want to give him the impression that the world only exists for white people with enough money to insulate themselves from the challenges these countries face.

I don’t know.  Ponying up for a resort is a pretty swell thing for the local economy.  When Denny and I went on our honeymoon to tiny Nevis, we stayed at a locally-owned property and avoided the Four Seasons, but when we talked to locals, they kept bringing up the fact that the Four Seasons has been a huge boon to their island.  They say if they get one more resort hotel, they’ll finally be able to secede from St. Kitts.  I’m not sure if they’re joking or not.

What to do?

I got a thing in the mail last week about the Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation. It’s an official-looking form asking me to fill out information about my international travel between 1996 and 2006, because I’m eligible for a refund due to a class action lawsuit against Visa, Mastercard, and Diners Club due to overcharges in currency conversion.

Here’s the official website: http://www.ccfsettlement.com/

It sounded awfully hoaxy to me, but Snopes says it’s for real:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/ccfsettlement.asp

I thought that might be of interest to those of you who do a lot of international travel. I estimate that I spent 134 days abroad during that time, so we’ll see what comes of it.

It’s times like this when being a meticulous blogger really pays off.  I was able to go back through my blog for much of that period and be reminded of all the trips I’ve taken, as well as the duration, because I always post “I’m leaving tomorrow and I can’t wait to get out of here” and “I’m back, here are my pictures” entries.

We’re back. We had some travel problems on the way back (unreliable bus to the airport, flight delays in both Montreal and Chicago), but we did make it eventually. I was glad to have a double-advantage in terms of getting up this morning: the change to central standard time plus traveling west one time zone made it seem later than it was. Otherwise it would have been hard to get my buns out of bed.

Montreal was very fun, by the way. My favorite parts were climbing to the top of Mont Royal (a gentle mountain with a lot of resting benches along the way) and seeing the city scape, and eating lots of good food. Check out the evidence here.

I had a brief moment of panic last night, knowing my passport was going to expire soon, but not being able to remember exactly when.  Luckily, it’s not till April 08.

It’s crazy that I’ve had my current passport for nearly 10 years now.  The picture in it is a decade old.  Old Passport and I have had some good adventures together.  I like looking through my stamps and remembering the places I’ve been.  The only downside is that the stamps can be deceptive; ever since the EU came about, they only stamp it at your first point of EU entry/exit.  Therefore, because I’ve often connected in Amsterdam, a person looking at my passport might assume I’ve spent a lot of time there, when I’ve never set foot outside Schiphol airport.  Same with Dusseldorf and some other perfectly interesting places that have just never been on my itinerary.

If I recall correctly, you have to send in your old passport in order to get your new one.  I think the last time I renewed, though, they sent back the old one with a hole punched in it or some other invalidating mechanism.  That was 10 years ago and pre-9/11, though, so I may be remembering wrong or maybe things have changed.  I do hope I get this one back. Ah, the memories.  I’ll have to take a look at it and try to recreate all the trips it’s been on.

Denver’s off and Montreal is on. This is good news. I have no problem with Denver and was looking forward to going, but I am more excited about a trip that involves a passport.

I generally don’t have much use for those last minute travel sites, since I like to start my planning months in advance, but this time it worked out great. Here’s what I did.

1. I went to http://www.11thhourvacations.com (recommended by a friend who bought a trip through that site and didn’t get ripped off)
2. I chose the Last Minute tab and put in my home airport (unlike a lot of these sites, it lets you choose even dinky airports like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines), then chose International and All Cities.  You can be more specific, but I wanted to see all my options.
3. A search resulted in the “Montreal, Canada: Luxury Hotel Getaway” package.
4. I chose my hotel, my flight times, and boom, done. We even get to earn frequent flier miles, which is another thing a lot of discounters don’t let you do

They also had a regular hotel getaway, but it was the same price, so why bother? Granted, we’re probably getting the smallest, cheapest room in the place, but it’ll be fun to stay at the Ritz Carlton Montreal anyway.

Best of all, it was downright affordable. Let’s just say that 2 round-trip plane tickets from Cedar Rapids and 4 nights at the Ritz were in the same price range as some of the hyper-modern cribs Denny was interested in. I think the money is better-spent on this; babies have no taste.

Google Maps has solved a problem that has been vexing me for years.  This might not even be a new feature, but I just noticed it today.

So…whenever I’m planning a trip to a city that has a Metro/Tube/subway, I always have trouble with the maps.  The Metro maps aren’t usually nicely overlaid with city streets, so even if I have the address of where I want to go, it’s really hard to visualize how near or far that is to a Metro stop.

No more worries with Gmaps!

For example:

See?  Right near the Peel Metro stop (also conveniently located to McGill University and the Parc Mont-Royal, though I cropped the latter out of the screenshot).

Why am I looking at Montreal again, you might ask?  Well…it’s looking like the Denver thing might not work out, and I found a killer deal on a long weekend in Montreal.  Nothing is for sure yet, of course; a spot might open up in the training Denny wants to attend in Denver, and if I can find a decently priced plane ticket, that might happen.  But if it doesn’t, well, I might just have to insist on some French-Canadian excitement.