Learn Spanish Travel Spanish Blog

We’ve had a good year.   We’ve done more traveling this year than … maybe ever.  In the last 14 months we’ve been to Argentina, Mexico and Peru.  I’m the master of cheap, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do it.  For instance, we went to Peru for a little over $1000.  That’s cheap.  And the other two weren’t much more expensive (per week).  You can’t drive to Myrtle Beach  and stay a week for $1000.  Love those frequent flyer miles.  All of this travel was connected to learning to speak Spanish, of course.   And the most expensive part of the trips were the classes.

I’m not putting much time into Spanish right now.  After all,  I’m still working for “the man”, but Sherry (now retired) has really been determined and is doing great.  She does well enough to serve as a volunteer at a medical clinic downtown that has a large Spanish speaking clientele. Her vocabulary and accent are very good.  Spanish speakers can’t believe she’s only been studying for two years.   Especially since only, at most, 13 weeks of that has been in Spanish speaking countries.

She studies at least two hours a day.  She uses a lot of diverse media.  She takes 2 very different classes, has a conversation group here at  the house and goes to a church for another one, reads the local Spanish language paper “Que Pasa”, watches Spanish tv and movies, etc etc etc.

We were supposed to go to Spain this coming year but (and this has happened to us before) the dollar just kept dropping and dropping until now the Euro costs about a dollar and a half.  That can make a trip really expensive really quickly.  We were even going to use frequent flyer miles, but 10 days of lodging, Eurail passes, buses, meals and incidentals suddenly started adding up to too much.   We’ve never been to Spain and were really looking forward to it.  We even have friends there.   Our music teacher, Jesse, just married a lovely woman of Spain (Maria) and they now live in nothern Spain.  It would have  been nice to visit them.

I said that this has happened to us before:  a couple of years ago, we cancelled a trip to Germany for the same reason.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to go soon.  We’ll keep an eye on the exchange rate, and if it gets below 1.25, we’ll go.

So instead, we’ve booked a cruise in the Caribbean.  Oh Well.   We’ll get in a little Spanish (but only a little).  Stops in Grand Caymen, Cozumel, Belize and Honduras.  It’s not the same, but we do actually like cruises. What we like best is waking up in a new place each morning without catching a train or unpacking.  If we ever win a really big (REALLY BIG) lottery, we would consider buying a suite on a residential ocean liner.

Well, this has been sort of our Christmas newsletter, hasn’t it?    Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or the Winter Solstice, we wish you the very best of holidays.   For us, that means Feliz Navidad.  We hope your holiday is a happy one.

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