Travel Fears, Frustrations, and Secrets
Our travel fears, frustrations, and secrets dominated this last week on Jetsetter’s Homestead. And that’s just the beginning of the coast-to-coast fun that included communism, cultural awareness, and cuisine.
Welcome to the weekly recap where we catch you up on what you’ve missed, where we’ve been, and what might be in the works.
We were finally back to travel this week. After a month of no travel (and “not traveling” is definitely one of my personal travel fears), I was back on the road. Straight out of the gates I did the thing I dread most – a weekday domestic redeye sandwiched between two full days of work. I try to limit my redeyes to one every 12-18 months. After each one I say “never again”. This one honestly wasn’t so bad. It might have been that I came home to a brand-new Sleep Number bed at the end of the trip. That thing has all the bells and whistles! I only had two nights to sleep in it but they were both awesome.
And then we headed to Cuba by way of the Bahamas. We took the most mainstream route possible – a mass market cruise out of Florida. (There will be much more to come on that… SO much more!) One of my personal travel fears is doing things in too pedestrian of a manner (and thus missing the authentic experience). There is a common misconception that cruising automatically negates any chance at authenticity. I’d argue that it doesn’t have to.
Along the way we have been working to find a happy medium on the right amount of travel/life balance. Part of that has been figuring out a good posting mix here. One of the hard things about blogging is trying to make sure we produce enough content to keep you (our readers) happy. At the same time, we also want to produce meaningful content (and not fluff). We think we are getting to a good mix. We’d rather post less frequently and be happy with what we are sharing.
This week we shared a few things that we particularly enjoyed writing. It seems that travel fears, frustrations, and secrets dominated our week. You’ll see what we mean….
This week’s posts
- Three Secret Travel Toiletries I Can’t Live Without – I started off the week with a few of my secrets. Travel toiletries are something I’m fairly obsessive about. On any given week, at least 20% of the space in my bags is devoted to personal grooming. I will share more in the future but these favorites are three favorites you may not have heard of.
- Fyre Festival Fiasco: Wait, It Gets Better – Jim has been following the Fyre Festival goings on. That story continues to amuse us both. Now its lawsuits and sales presentations. Seriously?!
- Are Communism and Safety Fears Keeping Americans Away From Cuba? – This post from Jim drew some interesting commentary. Feelings about travel to Cuba are strong, it turns out. It isn’t just travel fears, either. This piece touches on some of the reasons why. The comments continue the conversation. We’d love to keep it going. (We will be on the island on Tuesday and Wednesday and look forward to the continued dialogue!)
- World of Hyatt Commercial Highlights My Frustrations With Frequent Travel Marketing – I struck a nerve here too. Forget travel fears – this one brought out frustrations, it seems!
- Tru Bahamian Food Tours – LIVE from Nassau – We love our food tours and enjoyed ending the week on a lighter note. On Saturday we were in Nassau and shared some of our live posts on Instagram.
Speaking of Instagram
The social media site is one of our favorite outlets. Every week you can find some of our favorite travel (and homestead) shares. Here are a couple of my personal favorites from the past week.
This week’s travel fears (or lack thereof)
In real time, we are live on NCL Sky mid-way through two back-to-back cruises out of their home port of Miami. We just wrapped their weekend cruise out of Miami. Every weekend they take a three night trip to the Bahamas that is quite the open bar party adventure. And starting last week, they now travel to Cuba every week from Monday to Friday. We are on board to cover the action from both sailings. So far, our opinion? They couldn’t be further apart in demographic or tone. Right now our only travel fears center on FOMO (“fear of missing out”) as we try to squeeze the best out of our Cuba plans. You’ll have to subscribe to our daily feed to be sure YOU don’t miss out as we cover more from this interesting visit.