After a fantastic winter traveling through Asia and Australia, we’ve spent the last six months back in our home base of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We returned home to spend a summer hiking wildflower-filled meadows, road-tripping through the Rockies, paddling high country lakes, catching up with friends and working a bit in order to restock the travel kitty. Mother Nature greeted our return by dropping a blanket of snow on us over the first official day of summer – our first snow day in nearly seven years. If we thought perhaps we had returned too early, we were certainly sure we had stayed too late this year. Before we were able to escape Colorado this week, over 50″ of snow had fallen on the local mountain and the ski area announced its earliest opening ever. Our remaining cold-weather gear was put to the test as freezing temperatures over the last couple weeks had us saying on more then one occasion – “we’ll never stay this late again”.

 

The plan is to visit Latin America this season – Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Belize. Some of these countries will be new destinations, some we’ll visit for the second time. We’ll dust off the basic Spanish that we haven’t used since our last trip to Mexico over five years ago. We’ll find some beaches, visit a rainforest or two, ride a couple busses into some remote corners of a banana republic and Heather will take a couple thousand pictures. We’ll probably drink a cold beer now and again. It’ll be fun.