Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Happy New Year!

Well, another awesome year has passed, and while I don't think that I will reach a "I've traveled too much" point anytime soon, it has been a wonderful year of travel for me. 2013 has been set up to be even more of the same!

At my companies Fall Festival, Karen won a pair of roundtrip flight tickets to a number of places in North America, and we've decided to Fly to Vancouver in June and and visit the region. We are hoping to visit Seattle, go whale watching, and maybe visit Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula. We only have 1 week, and while we are likely to rent a car while we are there, we are both being very stringent on not simply driving everyday we are there.

For my birthday this year, Karen purchased me a round trip flight to Honduras in March. We both got very excited about this, paid for the flight, and then began the serious investigation of things I could do while there. There are some incredible Mayan ruins in the country, a good diving scene on Roatan Island, and even a motorcycle rental outfit. Unfortunately, a number of factors led to me cancelling my plans to visit.

First and foremost, the motorcycle rental company, the only one on the mainland, does not guarantee rentals outside of tour groups. I don't travel with a budget allowing me to spend $3500+ a week while travelling, and since my trip could be bumped by a paying group at any minute, it was a bit of gamble on that front. The company has a history of people showing up expecting a bike and not getting one.

I considered going down and simply flying to Roatan and taking diving lessons for a week and getting SCUBA certified. I'd love to do this some day, but I don't need yet another expensive hobby right now. There is also a scooter and motorcycle rental place on the island that has XT225s (an older version of my XT250) that looked promising, but there are only about 50 miles of roads on the island from what I could find. I'd run out of places to ride in a few hours! The expense and hassle of flying to Roatan, and a number of  other issues made this less appealing to me.

And finally, Honduras is a dangerous place right now. It took me a while to finally acknowledge the information on this out there, but when the Peace Corps pulls out of a country due to the number of crimes commited against Americans, that's a bad sign. Honduras was ranked as the highest per capita violent crimes in the world in 2010, and the murder capital of the world, by a very healthy margin. There has been a nearly 20% increase in homicides in the last 5 years alone.

So, with all of these facts on the table, I decided it was best that I not go to Honduras at this time. This bummed my out a bunch, but several ideas on alternatives quickly came and went as I weighed through my options. Other locales in Central America are currently quite a bit more expensive, bike rental is not quite in season in Colorado for my travel dates, and there are only so many places in the US I want to go by myself. SOOOOOO, I decided to change my trip to NYC, over Karen's spring break, and we will both be going! Woohoo! It's not going to be cheap, but we won't have to drive at all. Should be a lot of fun!