New color!

Hey!

Welcome back!

We painted the living room...well the two of the walls. Observe!

It took a week to decide on colors. We had about a dozen different and very similar shades of green and red. We're still on the hunt for a matching set of curtains but overall we're very happy with the change.

Hope all is well.

-Cory

A Caribbean Sail to Ring in 2010

Once again, I'm late in posting about my latest trip, but it is what it is.

My sister, Rebecca, and I sailed on Holland America's ship, the ms Eurodam, the second full week in January. We rarely get to spend time together, so it was nice to just chill away from everything else for awhile. For the most part, we were unplugged for the duration of our trip, though we couldn't help but ring up the hubbies while we sat in the hot tub on the shore of Puerto Rico (technically U.S. land and therefore no international roaming charges). I was on the cruise for the International Food, Wine and Travel Writers Association 2010 conference, but for most of the time, we got to do what we wanted to do.


Some of the highlights:

• Holland America paid for me to get a spa treatment. I got a seaweed wrap, which sort of made me feel like a baked potato. It was very relaxing, though, and, for a first-time spa experience, I give it two thumbs up. I will be writing about the experience on Kaleidoscopic Wandering within the next couple months.

• The dessert extravaganza, which was held by the chefs one night, was by far more of an art show than a culinary marvel. Carved fruit and ice sculptures, beautifully designed bread art, a chocolate fountain, tiers of candied apples, dipped strawberries, mousse in every flavor ... truly stunning in every sense of the word.

• Relaxing in the hot tub. I know, I know, not all that exciting from the sound of it, but it was so nice to be able to soak in the hot water with no where else to go or anything else to do. I really did enjoy the night we were sitting in the hot tub while we were in port in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The lights were colorful and the weather was warm.

• There was a piano bar on board, and the piano man could plan hundreds of songs - everything from 1920s hits to modern gangsta rap. We spent a couple evenings in the piano bar and had a lot of fun.

• The Exploration Lounge was actually a huge library with computers and a cafe. It was on the very top floor of the boat, overlooking the ocean. Very chill. A nice place to relax.
• Rebecca and I were smart enough to pack a deck of cards (I never seem to have them when I want them), and we whipped through some serious games of War, including the shortest game ever. It lasted two rounds through the deck.

In the week we were at sea, we stopped at four ports: Grand Turk (Turks and Caicos Islands), Puerto Rico, St. Thomas (U.S. Virgin Islands) and Little San Salvador (Bahamas). Seeing as how our first cruising experience was pretty much a bust, I was definitely happy with our on-shore stops. Here's what we did:

• It was raining when we left Ft. Lauderdale, and it poured rain the whole first day at sea. It also poured rain on Grand Turk, the largest of the Turk Islands, which are part of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Luckily, Grand Turk is a pretty small, fairly undeveloped island, and there really wasn't all that much to do. We stayed with the conference group the day we went ashore to Grand Turk, and that was fine with me. We had a car tour of the island (at 7 miles across, there's not much to see). The island is still trying to rebuild itself after a devastating hurricane that swept through in 2008, and there were a lot of buildings in shambles. I was most surprised by the garbage dump, which was literally a huge pile of garbage next to the side of the road - and next to a school and cemetery. We ate some variations of conch, which is a delicacy in the Caribbean, and which I fell in love with in Honduras. Overall, a pretty chill day - cold, rainy, but at least we got to get off the ship for a bit.

• Our second port was San Juan, Puerto Rico. We started the day off with part of our conference group. We had a really knowledgeable guide who gave us a tour of Old San Juan. I loved the public art and fountains in the public spaces. The streets were narrow and paved with cobblestones or old blue bricks. The sun was hot, and Rebecca and I each got a bit of sun (Yay! Mission accomplished!). Once we reached El Morro, the famous fort in San Juan, we broke off from the crowd and decided to tour it. I was a fan because the view was superb, and there were aspects of this fort - like a triangular staircase - that I've never seen anywhere else.

• Our cruise ship next docked at St. Thomas, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, but Rebecca had found out that it's quite touristy and known for shopping. Not so much our style. So we hopped off the boat and caught a ferry to St. John, another of the U.S. Virgin Islands, but much more preserved for nature. Over half the island is part of the U.S. Virgin Islands National Park. The NPS office is right off the ferry dock, so we picked up a map and headed up the trail for a day of hiking. We only met a few other people on the trail. It was another warm day and sort of humid. I was sweating like mad, but it felt good to burn off some of those cruise ship meals. There were a couple places where we could look out over the island, and it was so green and beautiful. The sea was vivid blue, and there were itty bitty islands in every direction. Little white sailboats were floating around. Absolutely beautiful. Part of the trail went along Honeymoon Beach, which had very few people on it. It was a soft white sand, and little waves lapped on the shore. One of the stranger things on our hike was our discovery of hermit crabs, which, we learned after our hike, actually climb up into the hills of the park every year to live, then climb all the way back down to the beach and sea to mate.

• Our final cruise port was on Little San Salvador, an island in the Bahamas that is rented by Holland America for use as a cruise port. There were two Holland America ships in port that day, so the beach was packed (and the water was freezing cold!!), but we claimed our spot on the sand and did our best to soak up some sun on our last day on the cruise. In the afternoon, we went sea kayaking in a lagoon on the island. I've never kayaked before, and even though it was a hefty upper body workout, it was a lot of fun. I'd definitely do it again.

Overall ... a lovely week at sea. Here's hoping my sis and I get to vacation together every year!

Port and Starboard ~
JoAnna

Hey everyone!

I made a video last summer for the trip that Jo, Leland and I took to some of the National Parks in California and Oregon. I found it whilst digging through my computer files and thought, "hey! I should actually do something with this." So I did.

Enjoy!

Late! But worth the wait?

*Disclaimer: I fully realize that the Holiday Season is over and that this post should have been done weeks ago, but I had stuff to do (like finish watching all the seasons of ‘Friends’)!

Jo and I spend a majority of the winter break in Washington visiting my parents. We flew out on Christmas Eve and returned to Vegas on New Year’s Eve. We managed to keep ourselves busy while visiting the folks, what follows is a brief synopsis of the highlights:

Christmas Day

Mom made an excellent Prime Rib. Gifts were exchanged, including new WSU hoodies for both Jo and me (yes, that is grammatically correct…fyi). Wine was consumed, then rum. Cheesecake enjoyed.

Lake Quinault

Dad took Jo and me up to Lake Quinault to take some pictures and see the peninsula. Jo wrote a great piece on it for her travel blog. It was a beautiful day spent walking around the woods and the lake and enjoying each other’s company.

Zoo Lights

Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium, in a well planned effort to increase zoo attendance in the winter, decks the entire zoo out with holiday lights for the masses to enjoy. So we enjoyed. It was pretty and pretty crowded. A good time was had by all.

Seattle Underground

Jo and I spent a day in Seattle. We went to my personal Mecca (the new Starbucks flagship store), Pike Place, and did the Seattle Underground tour. It was a fascinating bit of Seattle history that I was unfamiliar with. We had lunch at a cute little Greek restaurant and tooled around Pioneer Square for a while.

New Year’s Eve

We got home just before midnight. There is a bridge near our house that offers a great view of The Strip. We sat on the bridge and watched the fireworks. It was a nice way to cap off the year.

Here’s to hoping you and yours had a great Holiday and that this year brings you as much adventure and excitement as you can handle…maybe more.

-Cory

Press Trip #2: Jo Visits Huatulco, Mexico

I'm about a month late with this post, but better late than never, right?

I went on my second press trip in early December to Huatulco, Mexico, a resort town in the southern portion of Oaxaca. This one was only four days long and was really focused on site visits. We spent a lot of time touring the resorts along the bays and we ate every meal at a different resort. These places are high-class places, and the food was fantastic. My two new food experiences on this trip were eating grasshoppers and shark, both of which were tasty. The seafood was plentiful, and I loved the coconut shrimp I ate on our final night there. I also had a chilled cantaloupe soup which was delicious as well.

Because this trip was focused on site visits, we didn't do as much as I would have liked, but there were a few highlights:

• Taking a catamaran out into the ocean where we saw a wild sea turtle swimming in the water. Even from a distance I could tell it was huge.
• Spending the day beach hopping, which equates to sucking up some sun and floating in the bathwater-warm ocean.
• Hiking up through an ecological park where we could overlook the river flowing into the ocean.
• Discovering a "secret" beach located on the property of the resort we were staying at. It was small, quiet and void of beach chairs.
• Jumping off a waterfall ... then really pushing the limits and swinging from a rope swing from a 20-foot platform into the water. Considering the fact that I don't like diving boards, both of these were scary and exhilarating.
• Seeing a huge (2.5 feet long?) iguana in the wild.
  

Some of the more unusual parts of the trip included:

• Realizing that Huatulco, while located on the ocean, is actually a desert climate, which means there were cacti growing on the beach.
• Staying at a resort that was so large I had to call for a shuttle to take me to the lobby (a 5-minute drive away).
• Navigating my way through the Mexico City airport, which is fairly confusing as it doesn't announce which gates flights leave from until an hour before the flight is scheduled to leave. And to find out what gate you leave from in the international terminal, you have to stand in a long line and ask a single woman sitting in a booth.
• Touring an eco-archeological park that is not yet open to the public.
  

One thing that I really liked about Huatulco: It is an environmentally sound community built on sustainability and conservation. When Mexico decided to build it as a resort town, it built in plans to create schools and medical facilities that weren't originally there. It is the only city in Mexico that has received a Green Globe certification, and that was a city effort. In many places, different businesses work in isolation to achieve environmental certifications, but all of Huatulco is invested in the city's future. It has controlled growth and programs in place that ensure all aspects of the community are included in all the planning stages.

Though I haven't written specifically about Mexico at Kaleidoscopic Wandering yet, stay tuned for detailed blog posts to come.

And now the part you've really been waiting for ... a few choice pictures of the nearly 1,000 I took while there:

Sunshine and tropical climate ~
JoAnna

Believe it or not, Jo and I have been married for six years. To celebrate we decided to use the gift card we received when we donated to NPR and go to Terra Verde at the Green Valley Ranch in Henderson and have a fancy pants dinner.

We got all dressed up (I even wore a tie!) and drove on down to GVR. The promenade was decorated for the Holidays with a big tree and a lot of lights along the walkway. It was really quite pretty.

Terra Verde was beautiful in its simple elegance and wonderful service. After browsing through the menu, we each decided to have the fixed menu: a pre-set three course meal that included $10 for wine. Jo had the caprese, linguini in clam sauce, and panne cotta. I had the bruschetta, chicken masala, and the chocolate indulgence dessert. Everything was amazingly well prepared and extraordinarily tasty. We spent a lot of time just chatting and enjoying each other’s company. There was no rush to eat and leave. In fact, our waiter told us just to let him know when we were ready for each course and he’d get it started. It felt as if we were his only table (we weren’t) and we noticed that all the staff treated every table the same way. We even overheard our waiter tell another customer that if she didn’t see what she wanted on the menu, just to let him know what she did want and the chef would happily whip it up for her.

This was also our first experience with the newest wine service style. You can still order wine by the glass or bottle, or they can give you a preloaded card that you slide in to a machine and select how much and what kind of wine you want based on price per oz. It was fun going around looking at all the bottles and deciding how to spend the $10 on the card. We saw one red wine that was $34 for two oz. Our waiter told us the restaurant often sells the empty bottles for $200. EMPTY. BOTTLES.

After dinner we drove down to the Bellagio to see the conservatory all lit up for the Holidays. They line out the small space with red and pink poinsettias and design small winter scenes in each section of the garden. There were scenes of Santa visiting a small cabin in the woods, polar bears at play and a model train weaving its way through the legs of a giant rocking horse. This year the Conservatory is dominated by a monstrous, yet elegant, tree. We took a long time walking around and taking pictures, both for this blog and for Jo's travel blog (where pictures of the conservatory abound!)

We’re off to Ocean Shores on Thursday to spend Christmas with my parents.

Here’s to you and yours during this festive season!

-Cory

JoAnna Takes a Press Trip

Is it the sign I was waiting for to prove to myself that I am, in fact, a travel writer? Early in November I played the quick turn game - one day I'm not going anywhere, the next day I'm getting plane reservations to fly to Honduras and less than a week later I'm in a largely underrated Central American country.

And this is why I keep my passport handy and up-to-date.

The whole purpose of the press trip was to show journalists that, despite the travel advisory warnings on Honduras by many of the Western nations, it is actually a very safe place to travel. There has been some unrest in the capital city, but there wasn't a military coup as the Western media says. Also, anything that is going on in the country is happening in Tegucigalpa, and though that is very little, it certainly has no effect on tourists to the country. Most of the country has carried on with their every day lives. As we traveled around the country, I was shocked by how few people there were ... the restaurants were empty, the hotels were unoccupied, the beaches were bare.

In my own humble opinion, it's when tourists stop visiting a country that places have to lay people off. And when people are laid off, that's when they resort to violence and crime in order to feed their families. Honduran businesses are doing everything they can to draw people to their doorstep - 2 for 1 discounts, low season rates during high season, etc. So, for what it's worth, if you're looking for a great vacation destination for a low cost, I recommend Honduras. It's safe and interesting ... and I'm hoping to take Cory back with me soon.

Enough of that ... now on to my trip.

So a press trip is a lot of work. We went from dawn to dusk and beyond, and then, of course, I had to login to the WiFi and get some other work done. We met with representatives of the tourism sector in the country and had to take tours of some things the average tourists wouldn't visit (the new cruise port on Roatan, for example), but I also got to do a ton of really cool things that I might not have done on my own.

(Side note: I had a bit of a camera snafu on my first day, so a lot of the pictures I'm going to post were actually taken by a fellow travel writer, Katie.)

La Ceiba:

Billed as an eco-tourism destination. We stayed at a fancy-schmancy eco-resort that was located on the edge of Pico Bonito National Park, which has miles of hiking trails. We had crappy weather in La Ceiba, and I didn't have much time to hike, but we did get to go whitewater rafting, which was fun and redeeming since my last rafting experience was on the Nile River and left me a bit turned upside down to the notion of rafting. The water wasn't all that cold since we were being rained on. The rapids were class II to IV, so nothing too rough, and parts of the river were actually quite shallow. Here are some photos from La Ceiba:

The inside of a cocao plant.

Roatan:

Roatan is a part of the Bay Islands, located in the Caribbean. In fact, some people on Roatan believe it should be its own nation. A lot of cruise ships dock here, though I fear a lot of them barely get far from the dock. In fact, the person from the PR firm who was leading our group said that many of the people who dock don't even realize they're in Honduras.

We had some afterthought rain showers as a result of Hurricane Ida that came through a couple days before, so we never got to take the sunset sail that was on the schedule, but we did get to snorkel with dolphins and go zip lining, which were my personal favorites on the island. I wasn't such a big fan of the macaw and monkey experiences, as I'm just generally not a fan of zoos of sorts. A lot of the monkeys were free to roam the treetops, but not all of them. Nonetheless, I got a few shots of me with some of the free roamers.

The resort we stayed in was a 5-star beauty, and the rooms would more accurately be described as a condo. It had a bedroom, kitchen, living room and balcony. My favorite part of the resort was the infinity pool.

All photos are by Katie (except for the dolphin ... that came from Anthony's Key Resort):


Copan:

Copan is a quaint, quiet town seven miles from the Guatemala border. It is very different than either La Ceiba or Roatan. The streets are cobblestone and narrow. Cowboys lounge on the street corners. Women chill with their goods laid out on the blankets on the sidewalk. It's a very chill and laidback place.

Copan is best known for its Mayan ruins, which are some of the most intricate and finest examples of Mayan ruins in the whole world. When we went, there were hardly any people there. We had a guide, and anyone who visits the grounds would be wise to hire a guide as well. It provides a lot more context for the ruins. One of the coolest parts of the ruins is that it is home to the longest inscription of hieroglyphics in the world. That's what makes it an UNESCO Heritage Site.

We visited a macaw sanctuary as well, which I liked a lot better than the one on Roatan, because here the birds were actually free to fly away if they wanted to.

The other really fantastic thing we did while we were in Copan was go to a ranch ... my introduction to agritourism, which was fantastic. The farmer, Carlos, grows over 90% of the family's food on the farm. We got a quick introduction to some of the produce grown on the grounds in the morning, and nearly our whole lunch came from the grounds ~ produce, meat, butter, etc. He showed us all the workings of his on-site coffee plantation, and the "highlight" of our farm visit was the horseback riding. So it turns out that I'm not such a big fan of horseback riding ... My horse, Sol, was definitely gentle enough, but I guess I'm just not a big horse person. The countryside was beautiful, though. To top off our stay in Copan, we went to the hot springs (definitely needed after the jarring horseback ride), which were isolated and totally engulfed in the rainforest. Overall, Copan was a very relaxing place to end our stay.

(Look ... I got a loner camera!):