May 2008

After we booked our South Florida trip (and being the crazy travelers that we are), I started looking up flights to various places in the Caribbean. Since Miami is American Airlines' (our international airline of choice) Caribbean/South American hub, I figured that I would be able to find a decent ticket to the Bahamas or somewhere close by. My research came up with a great deal to the small Netherlands Antilliean island of Curaçao, just off the coast of northern Venezuela. Seeing that we had just visited the Dutch part of Belgium earlier in the year (and loved it), I was thrilled to get to go to a place where the Dutch love to vacation (there is a direct flight from Amsterdam). Another bonus for us was to be able to go to a foreign Caribbean island and not have to listen to Americans the whole time plus we were thrilled that there was a direct flight from Miami.

This was the first vacation for the two of us that was just about relaxing and doing nothing. To be honest, we weren't really sure that it would be a vacation that we would like. We are used to vacations in cities with lots to do and Curaçao is a small island with not much to do. We were also staying in a beach resort (that was 45 minutes away from the capital) in the far western part of the island where it is sparsely populated. I have always picked the city over the beach, so I wasn't really sure about how I would deal with the lack of traffic, noise and people. We were pleasantly surprised that we LOVED it!

Our trip began with the Miami International Airport. Wow! What craziness! I had never seen so many people at an airport during a non-holiday time (and remember I have flown out of LAX a lot) and thought that we were never getting through the line. Luckily, the international line (Curaçao was considered international and we didn't have to go in the very long Caribbean/Puerto Rico line) was short. The lady behind the counter asked if we were going on our honeymoon and I said no. But later, we realized that she was probably going to upgrade us to first class if we said yes. Oh, well.

We decided to stay at the Lodge Kura Hulanda & Beach Club instead of the Marriott, which ended up being the perfect choice since most of our fellow American travelers on the plane were staying there. Since we were traveling during the shoulder season, we pretty much shared the resort with only 30 people or so, who were mostly Dutch with a very few Americans and Canadians thrown in the mix. The hotel sits on a cliff overlooking the ocean with its' own secluded beach. The staff was friendly and attentive (most of them spoke English very well and the ones that didn't, spoke enough to get by) and made sure that all the guests had a great time. Even the few small Dutch children that were at the resort were perfectly well behaved. Getting into the ocean water was a bit on the rough side because of all the coral & rocks that are right off the sand, but after awhile, you get used to it. Water shoes would have been good. As soon as you entered the water, there was some decent snorkeling (mostly fish since the coral was dead around the area). It was my first time snorkeling and after figuring out that it was my mask that was having issues (it kept fogging up) and not user error, I had a great time. We had purchased our gear in Kansas City before we left so that we wouldn't have to rent them for $20/hr, which ended up being great since we snorkeled quite a bit whenever we went down to the beach. I LOVED the fact that someone would come and bring us drinks if we wanted while on the beach. We threw back more than our fair share of Polar & Amstel Bright (not light, but bright which specially made for the Caribbean) beers and I got the bartenders to fix me the perfect mango daiquiri (which ended up being my drink of choice). The pool was beautiful and had a great view of the ocean. Chris took a few siestas in the cabanas by the pool on a couple of the afternoons.

After a couple of days of doing nothing in the sun, we decided that since we had a car (we forgot to take a picture of it, but seriously, it could have fit in the back of my 4-Runner) that we should venture outside of the resort. One night, we went to eat at a restaurant that was close by that the bellman had told us about. The restaurant, Jaanchie's, is famous for uncaged songbirds that fly around the open-air dining room. Since it was nearly dark when we got there, I did not realize that the things that were actually flying around were bats (another one of my least favorite things!) until I started looking at the pictures that I had taken. Chris had realized what they were, but wanted to keep it a secret until after the dinner was over. Being a good sport, I sat cringing with each bite while they flew back and forth next to my head. The meal was great (Chris had goat stew and fried conch, while I had grouper and shrimp) and the owner even gave me a present of a painted, hand-carved parrot with the restaurant's name on it as a memento of our meal. It was a good thing that it was a bird and not a bat or I might have left screaming!

The next day, we decided to head for the capital, Willemstad, to see the Dutch architecture that we had read about that is painted in Caribbean colors and to do some shopping. Since our hotel had a sister hotel in the city, we were able to park our car in their lot for free. The hotel, Hotel Kura Hulanda, is like a little village in the middle of the big city and worth a look at. We ate at the Gorverneur De Rouville, which over looks the water and faces some of the Dutch architecture. Chris had the yeshi yena (the local speciality of stuffed cheese, chicken & prunes! It sounds weird but it was really good) and lobster bisque & a lamb sandwich for me. This is what we were looking at while we ate. Willemstad has an interesting floating bridge called Queen Emma Bridge, which opens and closes frequently to let ships pass. It looks like it's swinging away from the other side and you take a ferry to the other side when the bridge is closed. After our ferry ride back, I was starting to get grumpy because of the heat and the $2 bottles of water didn't help matters, so we went back and spent the rest of our trip never leaving the resort.

http://www.curacao.com/ Curaçao is overshadowed by the more popular island to the west, Aruba, but we were happy that we decided to give it a try. Things that I learned on our Caribbean vacation 1) we can have a vacation where we do NOTHING (actually it's bad because it's opened a new can of worms of places to go) 2) I am not able to wear multiple styles of bikinis on my Caribbean vacation unless I want to have 160 different tan lines 3) snorkeling is ok and I am not going to be eaten by a shark 4) don't trust flying objects after the sun has set and 5) Chris doesn't snore when he naps in cabanas, so maybe we need to move somewhere he can sleep outside all the time. We were sad to see our time here end. We decided that our 5 days/4 nights wasn't enough time, but then again, 2 months in paradise still wouldn't be enough.

About ten years ago, I read a biography about my favorite author, Ernest Hemingway, which detailed his life in Key West, FL. Since finishing that book, I have been wanting to make the pilgrimage to his house to see where the author lived and wrote one of my favorite books For Whom The Bell Tolls. We knew that it was going to be too short of a trip (we were only there for one night), but we were both ready to visit this island paradise that we had heard so much about from friends and travel shows.

We started driving on May 15th from Florida City (which is at the gateway to the Keys) around 8:30 AM and kept the convertible top up while the weather was still a bit on the cool side. Our first stop in the Keys was 30 miles away in Key Largo to see the original boat from the Hepburn/Bogart classic African Queen (one of my favorites). Funny quote from Chris "What movie is this from?" Not super exciting, but it gave us a chance to put the top down. Chris kept teasing me that there were crocodiles (one of my least favorite things in the world) waiting in the waters for me--not really funny.

We made it over to Key West in about 3 hours, just in time to eat lunch at the Cuban restaurant, El Siboney, that is hidden in the corner of a residental area. Chris had fried pork cubes, while I stuck with my seafood theme for the trip and ate freshly caught grouper. Our restaurant picks in Key West came from the website http://www.roadfood.com/ and we were very pleased with all three meals. Dinner and breakfast were especially great. Our dinner was at the Victorian House turned into restaurant, Louis' Backyard, where we had a wonderful view of the water and enjoyed a magnificent meal. I was especially excited that the restaurant had shrimp and grits (I am big fan of grits) and made up my mind of what I was having as soon as I noticed the picture on roadfood of the dish. I was not disappointed in my plate and even had to smack Chris' fork away a couple of times, while devouring the shrimp, grits and sauteed veggies in my bowl. This is our view from our table that night. Our wonderful meals in Key West was finished off by breakfast at Blue Heaven http://blueheavenkw.homestead.com/Blue_Heaven_Restaurant_Key_West.html. This is a quirky restaurant with an outdoor eating area with random chickens & roosters running around and kitties taking siestas. Ernest Hemingway also boxed and had cock fights at this location. We had to wait awhile for a table, but it gave us time to look around the grounds where people were selling their artwork, a lady was singing some folk songs and people were starting to drink at the bar (Key West is serious about their drinking!). Ever since New Hampshire Street Bistro closed down in Lawrence, both of us haven't been able to cure our Eggs Benedict cravings. So we each ordered one (a regular one for me and a lobster one for Chris). Marvelous! Both were perfect and Chris' spiny FL lobster was sweet, tender and unbelievable. They didn't call the restaurant Blue Heaven for nothing!

As for the non-food side of our trip, we were able to do a lot in our short time on the island. Key West is small and compact. If you have a car there, it's really easy to get to all the attractions in a short amount of time. Since we weren't hanging out at the beach (we were waiting for the Carribean part of the trip for that), we did everything that we had planned on doing. My only "to-do" was to visit the Hemingway House, which was well worth it for the historical aspect, the friendly, lazy kitties and beautiful garden. This picture is pretty typical of the Hemingway Cats: lazy, lazy, lazy. Other things that we did were the Key West Lighthouse (88 steps to a great view of the island), Fort Taylor (which was actually used in the Cuban Missile Crisis in Oct 1962), shop & walk down Duval Street, the Southernmost Point of the U.S.A. Marker (which my geography nerd told me really isn't the southernmost point) and a drink at Sloppy Joe's.

All in all, Key West was very relaxing, laid back and a perfect place to get away from everything. We'll be sure to visit again!

In 2005, we had planned a trip to Miami to see the Florida Marlins play after finding an incredible deal for the new Hilton downtown. But mother nature wasn't playing fair that weekend and both our flight and hotel reservations were cancelled due to a hurricane hitting Miami. So years later, we found ourselves with Dolphins Stadium still on our list of baseball stadiums that we hadn't made it to. After seeing that the Kansas City Royals were going to be playing the Marlins in interleague play this year, we decided it was time to try again (and this time during non-hurricane season).

We went to Miami having no expectations due to our lack of desire to go bar hopping at the "meat market" bars, the city's pretentious reputation, baseball played in a football stadium and from what other friends had said about the city. With the goal of stimulating the American economy, we packed our bags to visit this culturally diverse area of the country. Our plan was to spend a night in Miami, a night in Key West, then back to Miami before leaving for the island of Curacao on Saturday morning. I landed in South Florida armed with my National Geographic Traveler book, a list of art museums, a very hungry appetite, plenty of sunscreen and excitement for our drive down to the Keys. I was fully expecting to visit Miami and not be very impressed with it. I thought that I would have just checked it off as another place that we had visited and be done with it, but was I wrong!

Even without partying it up on South Beach with the "pretty people" and $15 drinks, we found plenty to do that keep us occupied while visiting this very Latino city. There is no shortage of art museums (yeah!) in the area and we were able to catch an incredible Alexander Calder jewelry exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. I had watched Food Network months back and caught Giada's show when she was in Miami. One of the restaurants that she had visited was Joe's Stone Crabs. At the time, I had never heard of this culinary delight and had mentally added stone crabs to my list of things to eat in my lifetime. For those of you who don't know anything about stone crabs, the crabs have small bodies that aren't eaten, but very large claws. They harvest them by removing one of the claws, then throwing them back to sea to regrow the claws. Luckily, we made it to FL just in time for the last weekend of the season (Oct 15-May 15)! Our meal of stone crabs, hash browns, cole slaw and key lime pie was AMAZING! If you love seafood and you happen to be in Miami during stone crab season, we highly recommend that you empty your wallet (it's not cheap) and eat here. The crab claws are meaty, sweet, juicy and full of flavor. We had ordered a slice of key lime pie to share (at $7.95 a piece, it's not a bargain) because I am reading 1001 Things To Eat Before You Diet by Ian Jackson and he mentions the restaurant's pie not once but 4 times in his book. After happily devouring 3/4 of the slice, I told Chris that he needed to go get another slice (his favorite dessert), which he enjoyed all by himself. It was a very thick, custard-y, tart filling with a wonderful graham cracker crust.

Another joy of Miami is the abundance of Cuban restaurants and we took full advantage of this fact. Right before leaving for FL, I stumbled upon a wonderful website http://3guysfrommiami.com/ which was a goldmine of Cuban restaurants in the area. We ate at three of them (and the Cuban sandwich one twice), all of them bringing smiles to our faces. This was our favorite Cuban restaurant in Miami. It's a fish market with a huge restaurant attached. While waiting for our meal, we watched the waitress bring fresh fish from the market to the kitchen counter and listened to everyone around speaking Spanish. We ate some incredible smokey fish dip, a 1/2 lb of fried dolphin eggs (not the mammal, but the fish), a bunch of crab croquettes and shared a large plate of oven baked dolphin fish with some beans & Cuban rice (I am still wondering how they make plain white rice with so much flavor?). The bill came to our table and we both gasped that it was only $18!

We finally were able to watch a baseball game in Miami with the Royals actually winning the game that we saw on May 16th. The stadium is where the Dolphins play football and it isn't anything too exciting when the Marlins are there. The fan base is very small and the place seemed like it was only at 30% capcity on a Friday night. But we were treated to seeing the Marlin Manatees, who happened to be performing that night. You ask what are the Manatees? They are the Marlins' (overweight) all-male dance squad, the first in the major league (I am hoping the last one too). We'll spare you the pictures because it's not pretty with a couple of the members pushing 400. Yikes!

I was reading a travel magazine before the trip and noticed that the Fairchild Tropical Gardens had a Botero/Chihuly/Lichtenstein exhibit through the end of May. We suffered in some very steamy, hot weather to walk the grounds to look at all of the sculptures and glass works that had been placed around the gardens for the exhibit. We also were able to visit the Vizcaya, an Italian-style 34 room villa that sits along the water, that was James Deering's winter home from 1916-1925. The one word to describe the Vizcaya is AMAZING!

We didn't really think that we were missing out by not staying on South Beach. We had a car and it would have been a pain (and expensive to park down there). Unless you are thinking of hitting the bar scene there and drinking till the wee hours, I would recommend staying somewhere else. Maybe we are getting too old, but I like my peace and quiet.

During our last trip, we decided that it was time for us to document our travels by starting up a blog. Everyone is always asking questions about our travels and advice for their future trips that we thought it would be a good idea to keep everyone up to date on our (mis)adventures. We hope that our blog will inspire our friends to enjoy their travels as much as we do and maybe even make some of you want to visit our favorite spots! We'll update the blog after our trips and hopefully even add a few more from past vacations! Please feel free to comment about our trips!

Some of our readers might already know a lot about one (or both) of us, but this is just some background info on us that you may (or not) find interesting about us:

Chris was born in Kansas City, MO, but raised in Lawrence, KS. He grew up rooting for the Jayhawks and graduated with a Geography degree from KU. As a child, Chris would write his name and address on all of his National Geographic maps that he had. During his college years, he spend many hours "working" in the law library surfing the internet to see what the longest possible plane trip around the world was (Fairbanks to Cape Town) as well as researching future travel destinations. He collects maps of all kinds and always tries to purchase a map every new place that he visits. Besides traveling, he loves KU basketball & football, Royals baseball, hiking, golfing, eating and photography. His favorite country that he has traveled to so far is Australia for its' natural beauty, friendly citizens and unique culture.

Grace was born in Louisville, KY, but ended up in Southern CA by age one. Growing up in year round perfect weather was rough, but someone had to do it. She has been traveling internationally since age four and by age 13 made the overseas trip to Tokyo by herself to meet up with her grandmother for two months in Japan and Taiwan. In 1992, she made the unthinkable decision to move from paradise to KS to attend the University of KS for journalism school. Little did she know that her path in life would take unexpected turns and she would spend her entire adult life in a place with cold winters and super hot summers. Besides traveling, she loves art museums, history, architecture, food, Dodgers baseball, USC football and KU basketball. She collects art museum guidebooks during her travels. Currently, her goal is to purchase small pieces of artwork in every country that she visits. She has given up her hobby of buying expensive shoes to fuel her travel obsession.

Chris and I met through a mutual friend years before we started dating, but in 2004, we were set up on a date. Our first trip together was to visit his other "family" down in Dallas a month into dating. It's been a traveling frenzy ever since then. Chris and I share the same passion for traveling. Both of us spend countless hours researching places to visit, looking for great deals on travel and reading up about our future destinations. Our summer travels around the States usually consist of some of our favorite things: baseball, art, history, architecture and food! We are willing to go (almost) anywhere because sometimes the least likely location becomes a hidden gem.

States Left to Visit Chris-7 Grace-10
Foreign Countries Visited Chris-7 (Canada, Mexico, Australia, England, France, Belgium, Curacao) Grace-16 (Taiwan, Japan, Canada, Mexico, England, France, Belgium, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Vatican City, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Curacao)
Baseball Stadiums Left to Visit Chris-3 Grace-4
Favorite Vacation Spot Chris- Australia's East Coast Grace-Paris
Best Meal on Vacation Chris- lobster rolls in Portsmouth, NH Grace- 12 course French meal in Tokyo (yes, not in Paris!)
Dream Vacation Chris- Traveling New Zealand in a camper van Grace- 2 weeks on the island of Petit St Vincent
Longing to Go Visit Chris- Palau Grace- Tahiti
Best Souvenir Ever Chris- Any and all maps Grace-Mexican prints from Mexico City
Worst Souvenir Chris- terrible disc ("artwork") from Mexico Grace- Curacao liquor bottle breaking in suitcase
Most Amazing Thing Seen Chris- Yosemite National Park Grace- Tokyo subways at 5 PM