Here is our final itinerary of Yucatan, Mexico. It’s a trip that I increasingly admire for it’s well rounded attributes of adventure, history and fun. We would highly recommend a trip like this to any family looking for a little excitement. And it’s comparably cheap for exotic travel!
Don’t assume the (international) GPS replaces a good map. We bought the Garmin mexico map set and it was ok, but not great. It was useful as a compass, and in the cities. It helped to know our position on long roads, to be sure we hadn’t overshot our destination, and estimate travel time. But it was generally bad at finding the shortest route and getting us there. Some of the new roads were missing, and it frequently thought we were driving through the jungle with no road. Get a map.
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Do bring micro-fiber towels. Serious backpackers will snicker because they’ve known about microfiber towels for ages. Car travel in the Yucatan means stopping here and there for Cenotes and beaches. The towels absorb all the water off you easily, dry quickly and fold flat. If you get the large size, like we did, they are large enough to keep little shoulders from shivering.
Best Beach [EVER]: Tulum: Perfect, powdery sand; clear, turquoise water; just-right waves for body surfing; totally empty — these are the perfect beach cliches. And, even with explosive development, Tulum still delivers. We could even hear the waves breaking at night through the open window. Paradise.
Best Cenote for Thiefs: Ik Kil. Ik Kil’s proximity to Chichen Itza makes it a favorite stop for the massive tour bus trade. Which means pickpockets. Duh, rent the lockers, noobs.
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Creekmoreworld.com is a travel blog for exotic family adventures. We are David, age 40; Trisha, age 45; Lily, age 7 and Emma, age 9. Washington D.C. is our home, although Trisha is from the Bay Area and David is from New York.
The adults are avid scuba divers, skiers, video game players and fans of heavy metal. In her youth, Trisha went on long backpacking journeys to Thailand, Central America, Europe and Turkey. David spent many months traveling Russia and the Soviet republics, from the Black Sea to Lake Baikal.
In 2003, Trish was diagnosed with a dangerous breast cancer. The real possibility of death made us rethink our lives, and together we committed to travel more if Trish survived. Our girls were still babies then. In her chemo haze, Trish would fantasize about taking a year off to travel the globe with them. It gave her the strength to continue the ghastly treatments.
Trish remains cancer free and the kids are now old enough to handle adventure travel. Our goal is still to spend a year abroad. But rather than take a whole year off, we are doing a series of month-long trips. The kids love their school and we enjoy our careers, which permit us to travel quite a bit. We are fortunate in that way. By the end of 2010, we should be a third of the way to our ‘year-abroad’ goal.
Most of our blogs are ‘live’ — we post daily while on the road. Our primary purpose is to record our travel for kids, friends and family. If we can help or encourage other families to travel more adventurously, it would be a bonus. For us, there is no purer expression of life than traveling as a family.
David currently works at an international non-profit in management and Trisha is a journalist and Web producer, working most recently at Discovery Channel and PBS. A long time ago, she wrote guidebooks to Belize and Norway. They’re probably incredibly out-of-date by now, so don’t buy them.
