Leave It To Mel Travel

Mel treated me to a wonderful trip for my birthday. We stayed at the Ice Hotel in Station Touristique Duchesnay near Quebec City. On the afternoon of our arrival, we had booked a dogsledding adventure. This was great fun!

We arrived at the venue by bus, and disembarked to the howling of the [...]

Mel and I are in Southern California visiting Helen Long and her family on Balboa Island. We are also going to drive to Santa Barbara and empty the storage unit we have been renting for years now…

Yesterday we had lunch with Helen, her daughter Pat Borison and Pat’s son Randy Borison, and Bob Lee [...]

We arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico late at night. One of our bags (my large one) did not make it, and by the time we’d completed all the paperwork and caught a cab to the hotel it was well past midnight. We had planned on staying two nights prior to embarkation, so [...]

During Christmas eve dinner several angels paraded through the restaurant singing a Swedish carol and carrying lit candles – lovely!

On Christmas day Santa arrived at the Veranda cafe at 8:00 am. We understood he was a bit hungover. In any event we did not make it.

We spent the day sunning on deck [...]

St. Barth’s is just delightful! Tiny, with narrow, steep roads and villas dotted all around the landscape. The capital city of Gustavia where we anchored is filled with quaint buildings, tons of expensive yachts anchored and tied up on the wharves, and designer storefronts. It is very clean.
The fist piece of rubbish [...]

After a day at sea we docked on Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos, at 1:00 pm on the 21st of December. The waters here are crystal clear and impossibly blue:

Blue waters, Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos

This is the seat of government for the nation, but it is very small both in area (around 10 [...]

We had dinner after leaving Roatan at Restaurant 2 with a Trattoria theme. The food here is always excellent, but on this night the real highlight was the simply perfect conditions at the aft end of the ship: tropically balmy and clear night, stars sparkling like diamonds, going through the colors of the [...]

We arrived and anchored at Roatan Island, Honduras the morning of the 14th after a day at sea. This island has a heavy English influence, having been an English possession and also run by English pirates for quite some time. The Brits ceded it to Honduras sometime in the 19th century. English [...]

We docked in Puerto Moin, Costa Rica this morning. This is a commercial port just north of Puerto Limon, on the Carribean side of Costa Rica. The Dole pineapple ship anchored just offshore was a dead giveaway.

One of the famous nearby attractions is Tortugero Park with estuaries and lots of wildlife and a [...]

We transited the Panama Canal yesterday. What a fascinating experience! There is all the engineering wonder involved – the fact that this system was conceived and constructed a century ago and continues to operate essentially unchanged.

For me also recent reading and historical context added to the fascination. I’d recently read a history [...]