Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

One of the most beautiful aspects of our trip is the fact that we can be so spontaneous.  We can change plans at a moment’s notice, go wherever we want, take as much time as we feel like, etc.  If we are tired of tired of driving, we can just stay put.  We are not bound by vacation schedules, return flights or two weeks of vacation per year.  Except for a few instances where we had to meet someone at a certain date we have been able to travel this way for our entire trip.  We’ve met a lot of people on the amazing beaches of the Yucatan who are only there for a week.  I’ve realized that it is a true luxury to be able to travel as we are and stay longer if we want to, or even be able to just come back since we hadn’t had enough.

After Justin left we headed straight out of town and two days later we were in Merida.  Once Matthias had recovered from Dengue we decided to head back to the coast.  It was over 300 kilometers back to the coast, but I really didn’t mind since it is such an amazing place.  Our real motivation to return was to get a flight to Cuba.  Going to Cuba was something I have wanted to do for a long time.  Flights to Cuba are fairly cheap if you fly out of Cancun.  We had a couple of offers from travel agents in Merida, but thought we’d head to Cancun to see if we could come up with a better deal and organize a place to leave the van. 

When we were in Merida we just couldn’t decide if we wanted to go to Cuba or not.  First we thought through the risk factor and the fact that the US Government says that no American citizens or permanent residents are allowed to go.  We know quite a few Americans that have traveled to Cuba and in the end we decided that we would be willing to take that risk.  Next we thought through the money issue.  Even if flights are fairly cheap there are four of us and it would easy cost us around $1500 for a 5 day visit.  In the end we figured that the experience of going to Cuba was worth that and we never would get it any cheaper anyways.  We also struggled with the fact that Matthias and I are getting sort of tired of seeing new things.  We’ve been traveling for almost 9 months now and have seen a whole lot of great places.  But I think we are becoming over saturated and are getting to a point where we can’t process or appreciate too much more new stuff.

Now the problem was this – we had spent 7 days in Merida taking it easy, hanging out, and being spontaneous.  Then we spent another day on a spontaneous drive to back to the coast.  Then another day in Playa del Carmen shopping randomly and looking for travel agencies.  Through all this spontaneity/indecisiveness we had just wasted a week and a half.  Then if you want to book a ticket you always book about 4 days in advance, so if we were going to book, we’d have to wait at least another 4 days before we could fly.  (At least that would leave us a lot more time to be spontaneous.)  Through all this we changed our minds at least 20 times.  At one point during all this hemming and hawing we were driving on this nice road with lots of beautiful butterflies and Matthias said “These butterflies are so annoying.”  I knew this man had reached his breaking point when little fluttering butterflies were pissing him off. 

Eventually I asked Matthias what the rush was and why we couldn’t just take it easy and hang out on the beach until we figure out what it was we wanted to do.  I never would have thought I’d say this at this point in the trip but Matthias is right – we are running out of time.  William starts school in September and we’d like to be back at the beginning of August.  We’d also like to spend 2 or 3 weeks in California, and a good week or two on the Baja.  We’ll be house-sitting near Guadalajara for about a month (although we’d like to stay more like 2 months).  Where we are on the coast is about 4500 kilometers from Tijuana which means we have a LOT of driving ahead of us.  If you start calculating backwards, we really don’t have much time.  So for now we are back on the beach.  It is beautiful and a great place to be, but I have this feeling that our trip to Cuba is slowly slipping away. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Mexico-Guatemala. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.