Hola Nicaragua!

A month after we'd gotten home from our Central Europe road trip in August, it was already time to think about where we were going to go for the kids' winter break from school. Staying home with the kids off school for two weeks was definitely not an option. I was also determined to go somewhere warm rather than have to worry about my Florida kids being miserable in cold weather. I flirted with Senegal but eventually decided the risk of malaria was too high. Next came Ecuador, but I didn't feel comfortable with the crime in Guayaquil or the altitude in Cuenca. I've already been to Colombia and Costa Rica, and to Brazil four times. The Yucatan was a possibility, but we'd been in central Mexico just two years earlier. I thought about a Caribbean cruise involving Bonaire and Curaçao, but I've actually never taken a cruise before so I put the idea on the back burner. One night I was fooling around with Google Maps, which is always open on my desktop. I like to click and drag the map around and zoom in and out, and my eye kept falling on that big lake positioned incongruously in the middle of Nicaragua. I'd never thought very seriously about going to Nicaragua. I wasn't sure how safe it was, or if there was anything to see that was differentiated from Costa Rica. My zoom function showed me a tantalizing hourglass-shaped island in the middle of that gigantic lake, along with a lot more interesting-looking lakes, peninsulas and islands around the country. Soon I had more windows open researching various places in Nicaragua and after a couple of hours I knew we had our destination.

My next job was figuring out how to do the trip. Renting a car didn't seem like the best move, given potential concerns about the quality of the road network and some crime issues. It seemed like the best option would be to base ourselves in the colonial city of Granada and arrange some field trips to nearby attractions like volcanoes and islands. Fortunately, while researching day trips I came across a company called Nicaragua Adventures which had stellar reviews across the board on TripAdvisor. We'd never traveled with a tour company before, but I thought that the relative cheapness of Central America might allow us to arrange a personalized itinerary so that we could get everywhere we wanted with one outfit without sacrificing our independence. I sent the company an inquiry and after trading a couple of e-mails, I had a ten day itinerary in hand that was far more extensive and ambitious than the localized trip I'd been thinking of. I decided on the maximum amount I'd pay to close the deal, and when I got the quote it was comfortably on the lower side of that number. We were going to have assistance on a vacation for the first time.

That's the story of how we ended up traveling for ten days around a country which up until that time I'd never seriously considered visiting. Nicaragua turned out to be a unique and exciting country full of natural wonders, beautiful landscapes, and friendly people. It's a great example of why when it comes to travel, it always pays to keep an open mind.