Travel

I’m such a chicken about flying that I have been seriously considering going to Puerto Rico next summer rather than trying to get up the guts to try and fly to Hawaii. Either way I am going to try and book everything early. I’ve been doing some reading on Puerto Rico and figured I would share some of it here (of course.)

I have an acquaintance that I also used to work for that grew up in Puerto Rico and whenever he talks about the place it was mostly in glowing terms.

One of the really cool things I like about Puerto Rico is the fact that there are so many different types of terrain there. I enjoy going up into the mountains but I also love the beach. The wife and I have had discussions about retirement before and sometimes I want to live at the beach and other days it’s the mountains. Puerto Rico has both. Puerto Rico also has the only tropical rainforest in the United States National Forest System, El Yunque National Forest.

One of the other nice things is that the year round temperature is generally around 80 degrees and there really isn’t that much of a change between summer and winter. Of course between June and November you have to deal with Hurricane season but other than that the weather is perfect.

Unless things have changed recently, since Puerto Rico is a United States territory you don’t have to have a passport or visa to visit unlike the rest of the Caribbean, although it’s probably a good idea to call the State Department just to make sure. I’ve also found several different places on the Internet to get information about the Caribbean as well.

I had a friend a few years back and his purpose in life was to save enough money so that he could retire, move to Amsterdam and live out his life in the land of clogs and coffee houses. I don’t know a lot about that but I do know that it’s a pretty beautiful place and I would like to visit eventually.

EasyToBook.com has plenty of deals on vacation destinations in Amsterdam. Right around this time of year prices on flights start to get much cheaper than the warm months and EasyToBook has some great prices on hotels in Amsterdam.

In addition to Amsterdam they also have deals for hotels in Barcelona as well as Prague hotels and vacations and information on the locations themselves. There are links to different tourist attractions and important stuff such as landmarks, restaurants and shopping. You can search for hotels specifically by location or near the attractions to make it easy. Nobody likes to book a hotel only to find out that it’s an hour drive to whatever it is that they want to see.

One of the places I would eventually like to go on vacation and spend some time is Costa Rica. When I wanted to find Costa Rica information of course I used the major search engines as well as the links I already had to see what I could find out about the country, about Costa Rica Travel and Costa Rica Real Estate because that would give me a general idea about the people and the economy down there.

Costa Rica is a constitutional republic in Central America which is bordered by Nicaragua and Panama. It is also the first country in the world to constitutionally abolish it’s army. It does have a national police force but no standing army and unlike most of it’s neighbors in Central America there has not been a civil war since 1948, the year that the army was abolished. Funny how that works.

Costa Rica is a beautiful place. Although probably a tad bit warmer than what I like I would still love to visit for awhile, and up in the mountains it would not be nearly as hot as the coastal regions.

I would like at least once to go see Volcán Irazú, an active volcano near Cartago.