McBerkoBlog

Dear reader - and here I'm speaking primarily to myself, as I'm writing mainly to document these memories for my own future enjoyment - I must apologize. I barely captured anything here about our Costa Rica trip in summer 2024, and nothing at all about our two weeks in Prague and Vienna in 2025. Maybe someday I'll catch up, but in the meantime, let's forge ahead! This summer we're staying in the US. Time for a nearly 6-week long road trip! Why now? Ruth will be a senior in high school next year, so this might (?) be the last time we can all do such a long trip together. Bill quit his job in April (yay for FIRE, aka Financial Independence / Retire Early... but that's a whole separate post), so we've got this short window where we all have the time freedom to do it.  Here's the plan: Leg 1 - Raleigh west to Denver. We'll visit Asheville, Chattanooga, Huntsville, Memphis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Great Sand Dunes National Park along the...

On social media, people often only share the best of times, especially during vacation. Let's get real here, however - our Costa Rica trip (summer 2024, finally publishing this previously drafted post for future reference!) did not all go as planned. We usually work through some hiccups on any trip, but this was the first time in a while that we had major airline delays.  Before the "embracing" part Here's a short list of the problems on our trip: 8 delays in the flight from Charlotte to Costa Rica, ending in an overnight delay Decided to make the best of the airport hotel by swimming, only to find the pool was closed Wasted a bunch of time finding a working ATM when the airport one was broken Took way too many wrong turns trying to follow Waze shortcuts on a stressful drive through terrible San Jose traffic Missed one of our two nights in the cloud forest Almost flooded a cabin bathroom with a misfiring jet on a whirlpool tub One of us got sick for a day and a half W...

 Today's post was written by my 7-year-old daughter, Zadie: Hi, I'm going to tell you about our trip to Costa Rica that we are going on in 12 days also I'm the youngest daughter of the person who wrote this blog so the day after school gets out we go on our trip. It will suck. I don't even get a day to relax before our trip. At least it is not like another of our trips when we had to wake up at 3 am. But we still have to get up at 6 am. When we get there, our house only has three bedrooms so I will have to sleep with my sister and I don't want that and she does not want that. But at least we get a tv and our own beds. Oh and the planes we take there are one to Charlotte which is less than an hour long and then one to Costa Rica which is 4 hours long. I don't know the activities so bye. PS - I hope you liked my writing because I cannot see half of the letters on my mom's keyboard so this was hard to type.

 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...