September 23, 2018
Where to now?
At the end of our last adventure, riding down the Pacific Coast, we flew off to Texas to spend a couple of months enjoying the sunshine, visiting with our daughter and her husband and just plain relaxing.
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It was a wonderful time and when we flew home to spend the winter, we were already asking ourselves this question "Where do we go on our next adventure?". Our original thinking had been to spend 6 moths cycling around in Europe, but thanks to some good advice from our friends, Steve and Dodie aka The Grampies, we realized that 3 months would be the limit for our time in the Schengen Zone. Ah well, back to the drawing board!
Fast forward a few months and we had come up with a new plan. We would spend a little more time up in BC playing with our grandchildren (never a bad idea!) and in the fall head back to Austin (because we love it there) and from there head to Mexico and cycle the Yucatan.
Some of the grandkids - we do love to play with them!
Getting back to our plan and looking at the length of time we wanted to spend chasing the sun, we thought perhaps it would be a little long to just be in Mexico, so Cuba was added to the schedule. We have wanted to cycle in Cuba for a while and want to get there before the Americans decide for real to lift all their sanctions and invade the country. We want to see it as it is today, without Starbucks and McDonalds on every corner. So, now its set! We will fly to Austin in November for a month. Austin is a good choice, not only because of the proximity to our daughter, but because the weather is more like what we will be seeing in the Yucatan and the cycling in Austin is terrific. We can ride, enjoy the sun and get some family time in (and hopefully practice some basic Spanish!) before really getting into the tour.
So, where are we going exactly? We will fly into Merida on December 1 and cycle from there down to see Mayan ruins in the Ruta Puuc area. This is the most hilly part of the Yucatan so it will be interesting to see how we manage to ride with our bikes loaded once again in the heat. However, on this trip we won't be camping, so our gear will be a lot lighter (we hope!). Rather than give you a blow by blow list of our planned destinations, I'll post a map of our planned route. Of course, nothing ever really goes exactly as planned on a trip like this, so we may veer off course here or there, depending on how much fun we are having.
Once we reach Cancun on December 14 we will fly to Havana the following day. We have a route planned to cycle in the northern part of Cuba, but again, we shall see if we stay with the plan or ditch it at some point where we simply can't leave a beautiful beach - who knows?
At the end of our journey we will fly back to Cancun to spend a week just sitting on a beach and reflecting on a)what a great time we had and b) how lucky we were to skip the winter up in BC.
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