Category Archives: Travel

Saying Goodbye and Summing Up

Since we’ve been back home in Indianapolis, we’ve had lots of questions from our friends and relatives about our trip.  We love to talk about our experiences, but it’s really difficult to sum them up concisely.  We didn’t have one favorite country–we loved them all in different ways.  Belize’s vim and vigor stole our hearts.  […]

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Animal Welfare in Latin America

Much of our Latin American voyage has been fascinatingly, breathtakingly beautiful, but there are a few things we saw that broke our hearts. One is the living conditions of animals in nearly every country we’ve visited. When the people themselves are struggling to eke out an existence, animals get bumped down on the priority list […]

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Life’s a beach.

Life on the ship was crazy busy during the last couple of days of our voyage, so we had little time to blog and reflect. Good thing we missed our connecting flight to Indy thanks to rain delays in Fort Lauderdale. We finished the Belize post! Good thing our bags didn’t make it on the […]

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Totally Tubular

Back in Belize for a second visit, we hired a cab to travel up into the jungle and go cave tubing (floating down a jungle stream and through a number of large caves on inner tubes). The trek through the jungle to get to the start point for the tubing inspired us to make an […]

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Dolphin Smooches

Eeeeeaaaaheeeeee-e-e-e—eee–eeee-ahEEEE-EE-EE!!! That’s dolphin for “I like fish. I want some more! I will kiss your sweaty face if you’ll give me some FIIIISH!!!” And on our second visit to the island of Roatán in Honduras, we learned a little bit of dolphin from our new water-bound mammalian pal, Anthony. Anthony is a 3-year-old male dolphin […]

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How d’ya like them (pine)apples?

Remember that episode of Sesame Street where they show a trip to the crayon factory? That was always one of Shannon’s and my favorites. On our final visit to Costa Rica (back on the Caribbean side again), we toured a pineapple plantation and put together our own clip to show how pineapples are processed and […]

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Spanglish

A trip like this inevitably sets off life changes in a person. It’s too early to tell what the full extent of those changes will be and whether they will be major course-alterers or just subtle shifts. Even so, already I sense that we are not the same people on the way back that we […]

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Across the agua to Nicaragua, olé!

Managua, Nicaragua, what a wonderful spot There’s coffee and bananas and a temperature hot So take a trip and on a ship go sailing away Across the agua to Managua, Nicaragua, olé We visited Corinto and León rather than Managua, but our tour guide Henry did perform a nice rendition of this little ditty as […]

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Fauna Galore

On our last day in the area around Puntarenas, Costa Rica, we hired a private taxi to drive us to Villa Lapas in the forests of the Carara Biological Reserve. We enjoyed a private ecological walking tour across five hanging bridges nestled right in the rainforest. It was an exciting day of beautiful vistas and […]

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Laughing with another Rolando

On Shannon’s b-day I got separated from her and the previously mentioned Rolando for a couple hours while I rode on the other bus from our ship performing my duties as a tour group leader. Coincidentally, my guide was also named Rolando. He was very happy and had some great insights to share: “We have […]

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