Blissful, blissful sleep. At 9 p.m. last night I pulled the hand-loomed blanked up to my chin and sank into the two thin pillows doubled beneath my head. There was no television to distract me. My cell phone has no international service, so it wouldn’t be beeping every time I received an email. A few gringos conversed on the balcony outside of my hotel room door and street noises floated through the room’s only window, but I was so exhausted that I was asleep in moments and did not wake until morning. I have been existing on three or four hours of sleep per night for more than a month as I prepared for my four-month backpacking trip through Mexico, Central and South America and this 12 hours of uninterrupted unconsciousness was a balm to my sleep deprived condition.

Interior courtyard at Hotel Lerma, Mazatlan

Hotel Lerma is a typical family-owned Mexican hotel. The building is old and patched but charming, built in a rectangle around a large open-air courtyard. The entrance gate is locked at 10 p.m., providing additional safety for parked cars and guests, however since the owners live on site, there is always someone available to open the big wooden doors for guests who stay out late. My room is modest but clean, with terra cotta tile floors, heavy wooden furniture, and crazy colors – marine blue for the concrete walls and bright turquoise for the doors and windows. The bathroom is tiny but adequate: the toilet flushes, the sink has running water, and the shower, which sprays directly onto the floor in one corner of the room and drains through the tile floor, has hot water (although the water smells like a cross between shrimp and iron). Read the rest of this entry »

Just in time for my trip comes this video:

Wow! Most blog carnivals fizzle out after a few weeks, but the Blogging Boomers Carnival is celebrating its 150th week today. It’s a true milestone, and as always, a fascinating array of posts are presented for your perusal at It’s All About Aging. Now let’s hear it for another 150 weeks!

Celebrating 20 years

To celebrate their 20th anniversary, Gap Adventures is offering a chance to win $40,000 in travel and travel related gear. The contest invites participants to submit an itinerary for the trip of their dreams, anywhere in the world, for as long as 16 days.

To enter, just log on to www.createyourownadventure.com and click on the “Get Started” button. Choose up to three countries to include in your itinerary, name your tour, and select the duration, highlights and activities. Then tell the judges why your adventure is like no other and deserves to win (Tip: The website says: “We’re looking for trips focused on sustainable adventure travel that provide life-changing experiences”). Once you’ve entered, get all your friends and family to vote for you, since the winning entry will be determined by a combination of user voting and a panel of nine judges, comprised of some of the most influential leaders in the travel industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Winter’s dreary skies and numbing temperatures make us yearn for warm Caribbean breezes but with today’s economy, most can only dream. Last December my visit to Curaçao was one of the most enjoyable Caribbean experiences ever, so I was delighted when I learned that Hotel Kura Hulanda Spa & Casino and Lodge Kura Hulanda & Beach Club are offering a special “Curaçao Now” package that can turn those dreams into reality.

Guests who book at either resort for a stay May 1 through July 4, 2010 and/or August 15 through December 18, 2010, will receive the following:

• $200 per person air credit from the Curaçao Tourist Board
• $200 food and beverage credit
• Fifth night free
• One day complimentary diving excursion
• One day complimentary car rental service
• Two complimentary tickets to Museum Kura Hulanda (available at Hotel only)
• Diving discounts (available at Lodge only)
• Various additional shopping and museum discounts

Rates include air and start at $499 per person (based on a flight out of Miami) for a five-night stay at Hotel Kura Hulanda Spa & Casino, and $519 per person (based on flight out of Miami) for a five-night stay at Read the rest of this entry »

You'll want to bookmark/favorite this site. Image courtesy of BestTravelDeals.net

If you are always on the lookout for tips and bargains, love to travel, and love to tweet even more, you should definitely check out the Ultimate List of Twitter Travel Accounts just published at BestTravelDeals.net. This very comprehensive list shows the twitter user name for airlines, airports, trains, subways, rental cars, hotels, cruises, pet travel, booking sites, travel guides and reviews, travel tips, and travel blogs.

El Chepe - the train that runs through Mexico's Copper Canyon.

It’s time to reveal my tentative travel itinerary. I say tentative because I never really know what my route will be. Some places, I definitely want to visit; others are potential destinations and still others are only “if I have time.” I generally have a hotel or hostel reserved for the first few nights, but after that I just  go where the wind blows me and figure out travel arrangements as I go.

Sites that are high on my priority list this time around are taking the train through Copper Canyon (Barranca del Cobre) to spend time among the Tarahumara Indians and visiting the Yucatan capital of Merida, both in Mexico, as well as hiking the Inca Trail to Macchu Pichu in Peru, and visiting the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.

Several of my fellow digital nomads will also be traveling through Central and South America simultaneously and I hope to cross paths with some of them along the way; there’s even talk of a meet-up at Macchu Pichu. Since my plans are fluid, I’m open to any suggestions you may have for places along the way that are worth investigating or should not be missed, or any comments with regard to my schedule (if, for instance, a particular plan to go from one place to Read the rest of this entry »

Another Monday means another Blogging Boomers Carnival. This week our fashion maven hosts, Deborah and JoJami, review what’s hot on and on the minds of our baby boomer bloggers. Check it out at Fabulous After 40, where this week’s selections are summarized in one convenient place, complete with links to each of the full posts.

I let my shadow lug around my backpack while I relaxed on the beach in Byron Bay, Australia

Some people have itchy fingers. I have itchy travel feet. Since returning from my six-month round-the-world (RTW) trip in 2007 I’ve continued to travel in the U.S., staying on the road more than 50% of the time. I’ve been longing to strap on my backpack and head back out for another round of international travel but the timing just didn’t seem right. Last year was especially difficult; I finally had to tell the bank to take back a property I still owned in North Carolina, because I could no longer pay the mortgage. It was a gut-wrenching decision, fraught with irrational fears. After a lifetime of building up sterling credit, how would I live once it was ruined? Could I ever obtain another credit card or qualify for a car loan? Would bad credit keep a potential employer from hiring me? What if I settled down in one place – would I be able to rent an apartment? Even worse, I felt like a bad person, a lowlife, a loser. I had never even paid a bill late, much less default on a loan contract.

Things got worse. The bank decided to sue me rather than foreclose on the property. I won’t bore you with the gory details, other than to say my attorney is still battling this in court, but the whole experience has elicited yet another shift in my ever-evolving view of life. It all began in December of 2006, when I walked away from a successful career. For the previous ten years I had been selling real estate. I had no passion for the job, quite the opposite: even though I was a very talented Broker, I hated going to work every day. Deep down I knew I was selling my soul, yet I plodded along because it paid the bills and gave me the resources to travel a month each year. I never considered that it took every last day of those month-long vacations to regain my sanity, and that with each ensuing year my Read the rest of this entry »