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!
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.
It’s hard to believe we have only a week left before the family departs cold, wet Washington D.C. for the Yucatan, Mexico. You can see our planned itinerary here, but we are sure to deviate.
Now, 11 days into the trip, we embark on our final leg of the journey: up the Carribean coast, aka the ‘Riviera Maya.’
We leave the salty sea for the inland jungle on the second leg of our trip to Mexico. Like the first part of our trip, we will continue to see Mayan ruins, but we will also see the cities of Merida and Campeche. The highlight is a camping experience outside the nearly-secret spectacular ruins of Calakmul.
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.
