When we finish a trip of a lifetime to a country that we have never visited before, we are often sure we will return.  Most of the time we don’t. The reason for this is understandable.  No matter how much we loved our past trips the lure of the new and the unknown is usually irresistible.  [...]

The first stop on our first trip to Cuba was Prince Edward Island, or, as the native’s invariable call it, PEI.  If you noticed that we were traveling in the wrong direction, you’re right.  The reason for this is that we did not know at the time that we were on our way to Cuba. When [...]

In last weeks post I promised to tell you how an ex downhill racer from Canada ended up marrying an ex international road bike racer from Cuba and how I got from talking to Mirley Macqueen and her mother in the Bike Shop parking lot in PEI to lying in a barber chair with a [...]

The Hotel Casa Granda is located on the main square in Santiago de Cuba. Photo:  cubareserva.com As we approached the hotel after a day of biking, Danny explained that the street is so narrow our bus would be blocking traffic while the luggage was unloaded.  He asked us all to help unloading the luggage so we would [...]

Post April 5 Kristen on Hotels. Since it’s Cuba, I’ll use a baseball analogy to describe how working with the state hotels here is for travel agents. The hotels are the pitchers. We are the batters.  The state owned ground handler through which we have to make the reservations is the umpire.  The pitcher and the umpire [...]

Now that barbershops in Cuba with 3 or fewer seats have been privatized, I am anxious to see what if anything has changed,. So on our first full day in Cuba (Saturday, March 19, 2011) we headed for the Plaza de Armas to find the two-chair barbershop where I had gotten a shave two years. In [...]

A slightly different version of this post was published in the April 20 Huffington Post. When Yolanda and I decided to return to Cuba we had no idea at the time that Cuba would be in the news much more than usual lately. Especially in the Spanish speaking media Jimmy Carter’s peacemaking visit, the first party congress [...]

What did the Cuban barber tell me he used for practice? The barber told me that he practiced on himself.  Chris Parrot, seen below in his blazing red lycra and matching water bottle cycling on Prince Edward Island during that fateful trip in September 2007, got the right answer; but according to the Contest Rules he [...]