There are endless beautiful sights in Monterey, California – from the beautiful beaches and hiking to the world-famous Monterey Bay Aquarium. See what else there is to do!
Are you visiting Santo Tomás de Castilla, Guatemala any time soon, or do you have a desire to visit this beautiful country? Check out the video guide I made below and see what there is to see!
This is primarily a shipping port, so if you are visiting via cruise ship, this is the port you should book an excursion on. There are plenty of things to do if you are willing to drive around an hour or so away from the port. We did one of the cheapest options, which is a $25pp tour of the city. It was very eye opening! You can tell these people are not used to a lot of visitors.
I hope this video is useful to anyone who watches it. Please leave a comment and don't forget to like the video!
Are you traveling to Grand Cayman soon? There are a lot of fun and exciting things to do on this island, so choosing an excursion could be difficult.
If you are on a budget, then an island tour might be the perfect tour for you. My family of 4 did this tour for a cost of about $15-$20 USD a person, which is substantially cheaper than what the cruise line wanted to charge for the same excursion. The sellers on the pier were extremely competitive in trying to get our business, with the different tour operators going lower in price than the one who previously quoted us. So don't jump at the first offer you hear, shop around for only a minute and you are bound to save $5 or more per person.
Below is a video photograph tour showing some of the sights you can expect on a tour of Grand Cayman. Your guide will take you past interesting houses such as the governor's mansion, how the locals live, a stop at the Tortuga Rum Co. where you can sample rum and rum cake, the dolphin discovery (and the turtle farm, right across the street), and ends at 7 mile beach. You can stay here for the rest of your day, or the tour does include a drop off back at the pier.
Please enjoy! And if you can, leave me a comment letting me know what you thought of the video, or if you have been to Grand Cayman, what was your favorite thing to do.
If you are like me, you went aboard your cruise thinking you could adjust your service charges while on your cruise.
NOTICE: You cannot do this while aboard your cruise!
Instead, they will give you a form and tell you that you can request a refund once your cruise is actually over. This was mind blowing to me...not to be able to adjust your tips while your cruise is actually happening?
To help you avoid the hassle I went through (almost 1.5 months!) to get my refund, I made a video that I think will help you out:
Hopefully this will help you out, and make getting money back easier when cruising Norwegian.
Please like my video on YouTube, and let me know if you have any questions.
Have you ever wanted to see the Mazatlan Flyers, or another similar group while traveling around Central America, only to miss out? Here is your chance to see this spectacular aerial dance! With a history rooted deep in deep Mayan culture, these dances are extremely fun to watch, as the dancers hang upside down from only one rope while playing instruments or holding a pose, swinging in a circle. The Dance of the Flyers ceremony is performed to bring forth rain, but different ceremonies were performed in the past when needed or requested by royalty.
Slowly but surely I will be posting things from my cruise in May.
One of my favorite places to stop is Belize! This country is extremely diverse in possible shore excursions when your cruise ship arrives. Cave tubing, ancient ruins, city tours, submarines, zip lines... you name it and you can probably find it here.
For those of you who spent all your money just taking the cruise, relax! There are cheap excursions you can do here. My group of 4 did a horse drawn carriage ride around the city. It was about an hour, hour and a half long and was $30 for the 4 of us. That was a pretty good deal, considering the same type of excursion through a cruise line would be $30 per person.
Check out the video below for pictures taken during the excursion and for photos around the dock that cruise line guests get to enjoy while in Belize City.
So I just got back from a 10 day cruise aboard the Norwegian Dawn, and I have a LOT of photos and advice to share from it! For now, I've got a video tour up of the cabin we stayed in about the Norwegian Dawn. Please check it out and stay tuned for more information from this trip coming soon!
For those curious, here are the places this cruise stopped and the destinations I will be detailing about later on:
And here is the video tour of cabin 5530 aboard the Norwegian Dawn:
I uploaded a new video I made to the Ground Travel YouTube page! I would love if you all could check it out and leave me a comment. Also if you haven't yet, please subscribe!! It would mean a lot to me :)
So in my last post, I mentioned that we were driving across America from California to Florida and I promised an update. Here it is! In this post I'm going to provide a very brief outline of the drive, where we stopped, and then tell you guys what we did to entertain 5 kids for that long.
The above picture shows the route we took crossing the United States. We chose a more Southern route because we hoped to avoid snow and other bad weather during the winter, and we were quite lucky. We never hit any storms and had a fairly uneventful drive! Except that on the way there one of the tires on the car kept having low air pressure. We had to spend half a day not driving while in Texas visiting multiple tire shops trying to get this issue resolved. It was a big hassle!
Day to Day Outline
Day 1: We left around 7pm from LA and arrived in Phoenix around 1am.
Day 2: We left our hotel around 11am and arrived in Fort Stockton around 1am.
Day 3: I don't remember when we left, but we arrived in Katy, TX at 9:30pm.
Day 4: We had to get the tire on the car fixed on this day. We arrived in Mobile around 1am.
Day 5: We arrived mid-afternoon in Orlando, Florida!
How to Stay Entertained
One of the most common questions about trips of this duration is how to keep everyone entertained, including the driver. It's important to have someone up front who can talk to the driver to help them stay awake. Playing music or movies that are fun to listen to also helps. If you can't have that, caffeinated beverages are always an option.
For the kids it was a bit easier. One of the best things you can do (besides frequent stops) is to have some kind of movie playing device in your car. We were lucky in that we had a built-in DVD player, where the only rule was we don't watch any movie twice until we've been through every movie we brought on the trip once. We brought a LOT of movies! Each kid also had a tablet to play on, preloaded with some of their favorite games (plants vs zombies anyone?) as well as educational apps and music apps where the kids practiced their note naming flashcards for piano or reading sight-words. We took breaks from electronics with reading books that the kids picked out from home, and spent time every day working on homework that the kids were assigned to complete from school while we were on this trip.
Remarkably, there was very little fighting. I think one thing that helped with this was frequent stops. We stopped every few hours for things like getting gas, food, bathroom breaks and just plain stretch-your-legs breaks. While stopped we would get out of the car and do jumping jacks, let the kids run around on any safe grassy areas and walk through the gas stations or stores to see what there was.
One of our favorite stops along the way was this HUGE gas station in Texas called Buc-ee's. It literally was the biggest gas station I have ever been to, and had shopping inside comparable to grocery stores in size. I didn't take any pictures myself, but here are some from the internet:
There are easily over 100 stalls to fill up at when you use Buc-ee's, and the options for things to buy inside are endless. Our particular gas station had a fresh fudge station as well as BBQ sandwiches you could custom order. We spent at least 30 minutes here after filling up the car, taking turns walking around the store with kids to both enjoy what they had to offer and stretch our legs.
You might be wondering, what do I do on long car trips when I don't have any fancy electronics? Well, you can bring a laptop and set it up to watch movies. You can buy an extension to charge a laptop from a cigarette lighter from places like Best Buy or Amazon. I would also suggest a pair of portable speakers if you go this route, to help with the volume as most laptops are pretty quiet.
If you don't have a laptop to use, then the old-fashioned route is the way for you. When I was a kid, my mom bought special games like Scrabble, Uno and Sorry that were specifically designed for in-car use so that pieces didn't get lost. We had coloring books, reading books, and blank paper to draw on. We had snack bags to reduce the need to stop often while driving. Our blankets and pillows from home helped us nap easily and comfortably in the car. We played the ABC game, where you try to spot all the letters of the alphabet in order as you drive along, passing them on various cars, stores, signs etc. We made up silly songs about driving that I still remember to this day.
None of this is earth shattering news on how to travel well with kids. But it is wise to know your kids temperament and plan accordingly. Having electronics AND colorings books, for example, for the kid who is easily bored with things is smart. Have a plan and bring extra of anything you can't easily (or affordably) buy on the road.
I hope this brief article was helpful to you; if so, please let me know in the comments! If you have any other questions about what we did, feel free to ask! Thanks!
Who is crazy enough to drive across America these days?
Apparently me :)
This time I joined my sister and her family as we drove from California to Florida. There were 8 of us in that van, 5 of them were under 9 years old. This took entertainment to a whole new level!
It took us about 4.5 days and we saw some pretty amazing things! Cactus's took on a new meaning for me in Arizona, for example. I had no idea that they grew this large "in the wild". I'm kind of just used to seeing oak trees and grass. Sure I know cactus's grow in deserts, but I figured it was one of those things that's oversold and under-delivered. Kind of like how all deserts are supposed to be nothing but sand dune upon sand dune with the occasional mirage and oasis thrown in for good measure. Or all Californian's visit the beach, surf, and have blonde hair. Apparently cactus's (cacti?) do grow in the desert! It just has to be the right kind.
The next best thing about driving across the country? Well, this could be the next worst thing depending on how you view it: gas prices. You have no real idea how badly you are being ripped off in California until you leave the state and find these ridiculous prices that hearken back to the 90's. Costco has some crazy good deals on gas once you leave California!
We also stopped at a gas station that has a real live tiger! Who thinks of these things?!
I plan to detail a little bit more about this drive across in a later post, this is just sort of a teaser. Stay tuned for how to entertain 5 kids on an approximately 2,500 mile journey of a minimum of 36 hours (let's be honest, people stop to eat and use the bathroom...no way it actually takes 36 hours!).
Natural Bridges Day Use Area is not to be confused with Natural Bridges State Beach (which is an excellent beach, by the way). This particular Natural Bridges is located in Vallecito, California and features a river running through a cave that is easily accessible for wading, swimming and a little bit of tubing.
My sister and I visited the cave August 4, 2015 and you can see that there isn't a whole lot of greenery like you might see during the spring or winter. Regardless, this is still an awesome cave. I always thought cool underground caves like this with rivers flowing through them only existed in far-off, exotic places, but I was excited to find out we had one here in California's Gold Country!
On the way to this cave, we stopped in a quaint little town called Copperopolis. My sister informed me that the Shell Gas Station there had the nicest bathroom she had ever visited at a gas station. So if after a long ride you've got to go, here is a good place to stop! They also have a really neat bell tower that chimes on the hour and half hour as well.
We actually stopped at Moaning Cavern first, because we didn't want to be all wet and cold walking down into that cavern. Check out my post on Moaning Cavern for more information on it. Natural Bridges is literally like a 5 minute drive away from Moaning Cavern, just a little bit further down the road, so it makes visiting both of these places in one day a great option.
Check out the video that I took below for an outside look of the cave:
The hike itself is not that difficult; it's a 0.75 mile hike DOWN to the river, so you will have to walk UP the trail to leave the area. The hike is about 2 miles in total length, roundtrip. The trail is very rocky, so be careful while walking. It can be hot on this trail, so I'd bring extra water as there is not any drinking water in this area. Plus, playing in the river, while refreshing, can make a person thirsty. The water itself felt surprisingly nice. I thought it would be unbearably cold, but it's just cool. We got in about to mid-thigh and it felt great. For those who are planning on getting all the way wet, it might be a bit cooler than you'd expect, though.
Here are some photos of walking down the trail to the river:
You can see they have some picnic tables set up in the area, so you might pack a lunch and eat it near the river. There are also lots of blackberry bushes, too! Most of them were not quite ripe while we were here, but we found a few and sampled them. They were great! Sources we read online said there were also many poison oak plants, but we never saw any.
I recommend taking an old pair of sneakers or some real water shoes for walking around. Flip flops or slides will make walking in the water tricky and dangerous, especially as the rocks are quite mossy and slippery. Explore the area around the cave before getting wet!
The inside of the cave is pretty awesome. It stays fairly shallow until you hit the back of the cavern where it narrows a bit more. We had actually bought a blow up raft to take in the cave, but we decided against it as we were unsure if there would even be enough water to float the raft on. There was, but you have to walk back a ways before it gets deep enough.
If you look carefully, you can see light shining through from the other side. You can swim all the way through the cavern and emerge out on the other side. We didn't do this, but you can find pictures online and more details in the link I provided below.
Here is a video of the inside of the cavern. My poor sister didn't know I was recording at first :)
IMPORTANT NOTE: We do NOT recommend taking the short cut AT ALL. The link I mentioned below where we got our initial information makes the "short cut" seem like a pleasant alternative. It is not. We walked down the regular trail and decided to take the short cut on the way out. Big Mistake. It was exhausting, because the first 3/4 are all up steep hill, with a tiny trail that is often overgrown with sharp plants and low hanging trees. The trail appears to never end. That's probably because it's a half mile (0.5 miles) long. You really don't save enough distance on this trail to make it worth walking on AT ALL unless you enjoy being a mountain goat. And walking down this trail would be probably even harder than going up; the threat of slipping and falling are much greater going down steep hills than up.
So, you have been warned. Stick to the main trail. Here are the few photos I managed in between gasping for air as I walked up the trail (a side note, if you don't visit the Moaning Cavern before this and have not walked up/down 235 stairs, walking up this steep short cut might not be as hard. But for me, after having done that, it was hard):
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about this adventure, please ask!
The link below is the initial website we used to find out how to get to this place, how long the hike is, and what kind of hike. You might find it useful, too!
