DH has to be one of the great Pen Pals out there. She will put a good deal of effort into maintaining contact with just about everyone she befriends along the way. This pays dividends as we travel given that we never seem to be too far away from interesting friends and acquaintances and it's always been great to catch up on the various life adventures led by all- in some cases it's been years between face-to-face contact and that was certainly the case as...

Leaving Key West and heading to Key Largo involved using the Overseas Highway, a dramatic 127 mile car ride and an engineering marvel that connects all of the Keys to the mainland. It was not, however, our next Wow but it was the means to get to our next big experience (although, to be fair, this was my big experience and definitely not DH's).As we've wandered the planet, DH (where the D does not stand for Dangerous Diva) has identified a number of activi...

To get to Easter Island (our next big Wow) we need to catch a plane ride that starts in Miami. It turns out that despite being one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world a lot of folks want to drop in for a visit. The earliest take-it-or-leave-it flight from Santiago to Easter Island wasn't going to happen for 3 weeks so we decided to take a quick spin around Florida. DH has identified a number of friends that will be somewhere in Florida during o...

To get a reasonably efficient flight to Easter Island meant that we needed to get to Miami at some point but since Cuba and the U.S. are still peeing in each others cornflakes you can't fly directly between the two, so we picked the Grand Caymans for an intermediate stop. Why Grand Caymans?? First, it was a very short flight from Havana which is always a good thing. Second, it offered up another of our bucket list items which would see us swimming with man-e...

Our last stop in Cuba seemed to sit halfway between the beach scene at Veradaro and the much more authentic Cuban experiences we have had so far. In addition to the many bus groups we saw, Vinales attracts a substantial number of hikers and bikers who enjoy the unique vistas surrounding the town. Viñales Valley is an outstanding karst landscape (limestone interacts with underground water and the water dissolves the limestone to form an amalgamation of caves, und...