McBerkoBlog

 A full 3 months after we returned, I finally put a bunch of our photos and video clips together into a single longer video to remember our trip. Fitting that today is just before Thanksgiving, since seeing this all together makes me grateful we were able to go and experience the culture, sights, kind people, and delicious food in Nicaragua. The video doesn't quite get across either how hot and sweaty we were on a daily basis, or how relaxing it was to read in the hammocks and float in the pool each day. For all the activities we had over the month, this trip overall was calm and restful more than anything else. Thanks for the great time, Granada! Summary of activities: Las Isletas Boat Tour Masaya Volcano Sunset Lava Tour Mombacho Volcano Hike Day Trip to Lake Apoyo Volunteering at English School Spanish Classes Pool party with our Spanish teacher and her family Running of the Bulls La Hipica Horse Festival Celebrating my birthday and Zadie's Visiting churches and climbing bel...

We were fortunate to be visiting Nicaragua in August, when there's a weeklong festival with many events. Officially, it's a celebration of the patron saint of Granada, the Virgin of the Assumption, though not attending church, we didn't see much of the religious side of the festival. From our perch at the top of the main restaurant and bar street, it was a time for lots of outdoor concerts and beer company sponsorships. Toña set up huge displays like this in several places on the pedestrianized street and around the entrance to bars and restaurants that serve their beer, which is basically everywhere since it's the Bud Light of Nicaragua: Immediately outside our front door Two of the especially fun events during this week were La Hipica, a horse parade, and El Tope de Toros, the running of the bulls. During La Hipica, people decorate their horses with fancy braids, saddles, and ropes and parade them through town. The parade was a lot more informal than we're used to...

We did several popular tours while in Granada, including: Boat tour of Las Isletas Sunset lava tour of Masaya Volcano Hiking on the inactive Volcano Mombacho Day trip to Lago Apoyo with swimming & kayaking $ Note: Tour companies typically accept cash only. The only ones we found that would take cards were online tour aggregators like Viator or GetYourGuide, which charged a LOT more than local companies directly. The Selina chain hostel and coworking space also sells tours and would accept credit, but their tours were marked up too. Tour companies quote in USD, but you can pay in Nica cordobas if you'd prefer. (We learned the hard way that it was much cheaper for us to get cordobas from the ATMs here than USD.)  Las Isletas Lake Cocibolca (aka Lake Nicaragua) is the largest lake in Central America and the only lake in the world to have freshwater sharks (!!). There are hundreds of small islands right off the shore formed by volcanic eruption from nearby Mombacho. Boat tours arou...

The Monday after we arrived, the girls and I walked the few blocks over to Casa Nica Spanish School to start our week of private classes. The girls are both learning German in school at home, so they shared a teacher to learn some Spanish basics. They also lucked out - their teacher's 8 year old daughter had the week off from her own school, so she joined them each day. In their two hours/day over the week, Judy covered several topics and played a lot of fun learning games. Zadie even started to like Spanish, which surprised me because she generally refuses to learn any Spanish at home and was not overly excited that I'd signed her up for the class. Ruth, much less surprisingly, learned a lot, and was comfortably reading menus and ordering for herself during our trip. She had already picked up many words from us in Guatemala and at home, but further expanded her vocabulary and started learning verb conjugations here.  Can you guess today's topic? 😄 My teacher and I were ac...

We spent one of our first days in Nicaragua volunteering at the Granada English Academy, where kids can learn English on Saturday mornings. We connected with the owner, Manuel, on Facebook after he'd reached out to an expats group for help. (We had joined the expat group because we've found it's a great way to get advice and current info on a location.) Manuel told us that regular schools don't teach English, so he started this school because knowing English can be more valuable than a college degree.  Working in an English-speaking call center, for example, can earn you multiples of the average Nica salary. Even though his English is excellent, he likes to include native English speakers so the kids can practice with a range of accents. He'd started the school in 2016 with five students and had some up and down years, having to shut down during the political unrest in 2018 and again for COVID. When we visited, the school had four concurrent classes running for diff...

After hearing that the Airbnb we stayed in is on a local home tour, I googled our house and was surprised to find that it was once written up in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/realestate/real-estate-in-nicaragua.html "Casa Blanca" was built in the 1750s, so it's older than the USA! The house was a splurge, but had everything we were looking for in a rental for the month, and I'm glad we were able to stay here. The location is great: It's smack in the center of the city, a block from the main square behind the beautiful yellow cathedral that is the first picture in any story about Granada. It's at the top of a pedestrianized street, Calle La Calzada, surrounded by tons of restaurants. The only problem with the location, actually, is that we were a little too close to those restaurants at times - the bars don't close until after 3 on the weekends and they can be loud. Fortunately, the girls are solid sleepers and the noise didn't reall...

We researched Granada before our trip, of course, and considered ourselves forewarned about some potential problems. Some of those problems never occurred, but others popped up that we weren't prepared for. Here's what surprised us during our trip to Nicaragua: Mosquitos... Or the lack thereof. We read a LOT of warnings about mosquitos in Granada, specifically that we'd get eaten alive unless we slathered ourselves with serious bug repellent daily. This was one of my biggest concerns in terms of daily comfort here. Two weeks into our trip, we've gotten a couple bites each - less than I'd typically get sitting on our porch at home - but have not needed to use bug spray. (We'll bring it on our upcoming excursions out of the city, but I don't anticipate needing it otherwise.) Considering that we're staying in a hacienda-style house with an open center where basically all living spaces other than our bedrooms and bathrooms are open to the outdoors, we're...

For my birthday yesterday, I asked the girls to write a blog post about Nicaragua. Here's what Zadie wrote: my favorite part is the pool and the pool noodles.  I also like the hammocks. and my bedroom is good.💙 I made my room messy.

Another year, another trip to a city we'd never heard of prior to last year. Of all the places to live for a month, why'd we choose Granada? Calle La Calzada and La Catedral Work Considerations Bill's working much of this trip, so like last year, we need to stay within US time zones so he can participate in meetings, and need reliable enough internet. We also like there to be a co-working space nearby in case there's some reason Bill can't comfortably or quietly work from home. Language Bill and I have both been taking Spanish lessons specifically so it will be easier to travel to the many Spanish-speaking countries. We looked only at those countries for this trip. Airfare Our approach lately has been to first look at where we can fly for a non-exorbitant sum of money, then decide which of those locations we'd like to stay. There are a billion places on earth that we'd like to see, so we're trying not to be overly precious about which we visit in any giv...

I've mentioned before that we use credit card rewards points to cover some of our travel costs. Since this is a topic I've gotten a lot of questions about, I thought it was worth a post to help anyone who's considering getting into the travel rewards game. Before we jump in, two disclaimers: We are lazy travel hackers. If you want to learn how to get free business-class seats to Bali by churning 6 cards a year, I'm not your gal. More power to those folks, but that level of obsession and planning is not for me. If you deal with open credit the way I deal with open packages of chips, stop reading now. Credit card travel rewards work only if you never pay interest or late fees. Seriously. If you don't pay off the full card balance every month, you'll never make more money from the card than they make from you. Likewise, if you buy stuff that you wouldn't have ordinarily bought just to earn rewards, that's a loss. How much can you earn in rewards? Generally...