“So where is your next trip? Iraq? Syria?”
“No, we’re taking a cruise to the Bahamas.”
Our travel has been an eclectic mix at times. In some cases that has been intentional (like following up Somalia with Seychelles), but most of the time it is just incidental to our goals. So as fun as it would be to mix things up just to keep people guessing, that isn’t the case this time. I’m not sure if I’ve really spelled out our travel plans over time, but I’ll take this opportunity to do so.
We hope to visit every country in the world. It’s a lofty goal. That being said, we’re approaching it in terms of shorter and medium-term goals and milestones. If you have a goal of earning a doctorate, it’s probably best to start by concerning yourself with the bachelor’s degree in front of you. We’ve been trying to maintain a yearly goal of visiting at least 12 new countries per year. We’ve been successful for the past couple of years. I realize that what we’re counting (and not counting) could warrant a separate post, but I’ll explain our methods a bit. Any list of “countries” is going to be offensive to some for what is and isn’t there. For those that haven’t spent any time on the topic, there are something like 196 countries (or 194, or maybe as many as 204 or 206). As far as I’m concerned, any U.N. member state is definitely a “country.” I also think it’s fair that most of the nonmember states qualify as countries (like Kosovo and Palestine and SADR/Western Sahara). On the other hand, I’m not counting places like “Somaliland,” as it isn’t recognized as a state by anyone other than themselves, and there is strong imperative to prevent them from breaking from Somalia. So that’s what we’re working towards. When we’ve visited anywhere, we’ve tried to stop by the smaller neighbors whenever possible and get the map colored in.
Another short term goal we’ve worked on is getting lined up on the countries we’ve both visited. The only country that was left for us at this point was the Bahamas. The Bahamas makes 46 countries visited for both of us. With that, we can start hitting big milestones (50 countries!) together. Our next trip should hit that fifty milestone!
So this trip was no adventure by nearly any measure, just a long weekend cruise to the Bahamas. It was actually the first cruise for both of us. We had a good time, but I don’t think the risk is too high of that becoming a regular thing for us. The cruise itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy. I was actually surprised that the food was like mediocre institutional kind of fare (we were on RCI). I’ve heard many people talk about how amazing the food is on cruises, but that just wasn’t our experience. We roamed around Nassau for the day and grabbed a nice lunch of conch prepared all different ways. Again, I don’t think we’ll be taking a lot of future cruises, but this did seem a pretty efficient way to check off some Caribbean destinations.
Old Fort in Nassau
Nassau water tower
Queens Staircase
Queens Staircase
Queens Staircase
Cracked conch @ Bahamian Cookin'
Conch Salad @ Bahamian Cookin'
Nassau cruise terminal