Adventure #11 - Exploring Cuba

We are now back in a snowy Sweden after a very fascinating 3 week trip to Cuba. This was the perfect ending to our adventure year!

We had booked flights and the first two accomodations, in Havanna and in Playa Larga. We had an idea of the route we planned, but no more details booked. And it turned out to be extremely easy to travel in Cuba. Everyone is friendly and helpful, so there was never any problems in finding a place to stay or getting transport to the next place. And staying in people's homes (casa particulares) was the best decision - we met so many interesting, fascinating and caring people.

This is how we travelled:
Havanna - Playa Larga - Cienfuegos - Trinidad - Santa Clara - Varadero - Havanna - Vinales

Havanna
The fascinating capital of Cuba! We started our journey here and returned for a couple of more days later during our trip. Lot's of interesting places to explore. The highlight was wandering around the alleys of Old Havanna and observing the lifes of the people in Havanna.

View from our casa particulares

Playa Larga
A small village at the Bay of Pigs, with a small and charming beach. We were almost alone at the beach, even though it is high season for tourism in Cuba we seemed to select the more desolated places. Here we stayed at our favourite casa particulares - Casa Frank. We ate all meals here and the casa owners took great care of us. We loved sitting on the terrace and just watch the village life on the street below.  Lot's of sounds - roosters, salsa music, horse carriages, vendors shouting "banana" or "pan"...

Cienfuegos
A French colonial city "The Pearl of the South", not so many tourists and lot's of well maintained houses and old colonial buildings. Highlights here were a trip to the beach Rancho Luna and the mojito on top of the Palacio de Valle. Also very helpful casa owners, and luckily for us they spoke English! We got some great advice from them that helped us during the rest of the trip. We ended our stay in Cienfuegos with an interesting taxi ride to El Nicho, a beautiful waterfall, and then continued on to Trinidad. Our taxi probably broke down around 15 times before we finally reached Trinidad.

Trinidad
A relaxed town which is easy to like! Colorful buildings, lot's of Cuban music and nice restaurants. Trinidad is included on most tourists' agenda, so there were more people here. On Christmas Eve we spent the day on the beach Playa Ancon. Otherwise it is no problem to spend time in Trinidad. As always, just walking by foot and observing the town is our favourite thing to do. For the first time in Cuba we found a restaurant that served really good vegetarian food, so our vegetarians were happy!

Santa Clara
The main reason to visit Santa Clara is to see the Che Guevara monument, and that's why we stopped here for a couple of days. We liked the atmosphere in Santa Clara, even though there is really not much to do apart from the monument.

Varadero
Varadero was not on our planned route before we left. But after visiting busy cities we wanted to spend some days at a beach. And the casa owners in Santa Clara recommended Varadero. We thought there were only all-inclusive resorts there, but it turned out that it is also a "real" city in Varadero with plenty of casa particulares. So we took the bus here and found a nice place to stay not many meters from the beach. The beach is over 20 kilometers with beautiful white sand, blue water and palm trees. And not that crowded! At least not the part of the beach where we spent our days.

Vinales
Our final stop was east of Havanna in the tiny town of Vinales, one of our favourite places in Cuba. Unfortunately it rained a couple of days here, but we still got to explore the fantastic landscape around the Valle de Vinales. We hired a taxi for one day and visited all the mandatory sights, with the Santo Tomas cave as the highlight. Every other house here is a casa particulares, and our casa was great! The owners helped organise everything we needed, "No problema" was their standard answer!

All in all, this was an amazing trip! Would we do anything differently next time? Yes, I would study some Spanish before leaving - that would make things a bit easier. Otherwise, we can definitely recommend Cuba for a different experience! Viva Cuba Libre!

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Light My Fire - sponsortävling

Våra trogna bloggläsare vet att vi under 2013 varit finalister i Light My Fires sponsortävling "Light My Fire Adventures". Vi är sju äventyrare som bloggat under året om våra olika äventyr. Det har varit en rolig blandning av olika berättelser, alltifrån mer extrema äventyr till våra små utflykter. En del är färdiga med sina äventyr, medan några är mitt uppe i sina resor. Just nu följer vi med spänning Tim och Laura som cyklar från England till Australien, Around the world by bike. De skriver underhållande om alla möten de haft under turen. Just nu befinner de sig i Turkiet.

Tävlingen har inneburit att vi fått prova alla Light My Fires produkter och i gengäld blogga om våra äventyr. Light My Fire har ju många roliga produkter, våra favoriter har varit knivarna Swedish Fire Knife och titaniumsporkarna. Även de olika boxarna i olika storlekar har varit användbara. Vi använder dom både på äventyr och till vardags.

I slutet av året kommer en vinnare utses som får ett bidrag på 3000 euro för att förverkliga ett nytt äventyr 2014. För oss var det aldrig någon drivkraft, utan vi såg tävlingen som ett sätt att faktiskt förverkliga tankar och ta sig ut i naturen. Speciellt när det gäller att få med hela familjen så är det ju lätt att annat kommer i mellan och det blir lite för mycket argumentation. Men nu har vi haft lite "press" på oss att verkligen hitta på saker.

Och nu är det din tur! Dags att anmäla er till Light My Fires äventyrstävling 2014. Har du någon idé om ett äventyr du vill genomföra? Kanske kan det här vara sparken i baken som du behöver? Och kom ihåg att "Everything you see as an adventure is one".

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Christmas adventure in Cuba

Our adventure Light my fire year is coming to an end, but we have one final adventure left. We will leave the snow in Sweden and spend 3 weeks around Christmas in Cuba. Cuba seems like the ultimate destination for us, easy to combine different interests. Relaxing on the beach, hiking in the mountains, exploring the cities, learning about politics and history, meeting fascinating people...

We will start in Havanna with three nights at a Casa Particulares, a guesthouse in the centre of Havanna. After that we only have a rough idea of what to do next. We have made an itinerary with some cities and places we would like to see and visit. But we haven't booked anything more, so we will decide the plan step by step when we are in Cuba. Hopefully we will get some ideas from people we meet along the way.

We leave next weekend, so right now we are making the final preparations. According to the guidebooks it is not easy to find internet access, so we have downloaded books, games etc to be able to access off-line. I am a bit worried about the teenagers having withdrawal symptoms from internet, so we need to find other things to occupy them with. We have packed the mahjong game, Scrabble and cards so hopefully we'll be fine!

This will be such a great adventure! Just spending time together, but also exploring a different culture. I'm not sure if we will be able to blog while we are there, it depends on the internet access. But we'll try to share some stories if we can. We would love to hear any recommendations for places to visit!

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Adventure #3 - Horseback riding

Finally time for our next microadventure doing something we have never tried before - horseback riding. This time we brought Sarah with us for extra support, she's an excellent rider so that felt comforting.

We arrived to Oak Wood Ranch north of Stockholm early on Saturday morning with the sun shining. We met our horses and helped to get them ready. It was a bit nervous to get up on the horses and the first practice steps in the paddock were not that easy. How do you make the horse move in the right direction?? After a while we managed to get the horses out of the paddock and lined up for the tour.

Helena, our guide for today took us gently forward on the grovel road. After about 10 minutes we started to feel more comfortable and could actually steer the horses somewhat... Some of the horses just followed the leader nicely like Glaesir and Bruda, but Casper had some problems getting Bob to go where he wanted. So he had some close encounters with the pine bushes...

We went through a pretty landscape with small roads and through the woods. A bit muddy and some of the horses didn't like that and tried to make detours to avoid the mud. We rode quite slowly, but we got to try the faster trot as well. And Bob chose to gallop for a while, not sure Casper enjoyed that!

We were out for about 1,5 hour which was quite enough for us beginners, we were tired, hungry and very satisfied when we arrived back at the stable. Great tour! Coffee and sandwiches was the perfect ending to this tour - which we really can recommend!

But our day wasn't finished there! Next item on the agenda was to go for a short hike and make lunch over a fire in the woods. We drove the car for a short distance and then walked a couple of km along Roslagsleden. We stopped at Lilla Harsjön, which is on section 4 from Lövhagen to Domarudden on the trail. This is a beautiful lake with a camping shelter and several fireplaces. When we got there, there were already people at the shelter so we chose to use another fire place close by. Before the lunch we showed Sarah how to do geocaching and logged the cache Lilla Harsjön.

The weather was perfect - sunny and warm. We relaxed on the rocks by the water and made a fire. The lunch was "BBQ chicken with couscous", a real de luxe meal. We were not in a hurry so we relaxed in the sun just enjoying the day.

I think the whole crowd was happy with the day. It was an adventure to ride the horses and then we ended with the lunch by the lake. What are you waiting for - get out there! What will be your next microadventure?

Planning our microadventures

I got a question the other day about how we plan our adventures. Is it a democratic process where the kids are involved? So I thought I would share some thoughts on that.

Well, I would like this to be democratic... Our teenagers have agreed to do this with us this year, and I think that is a great achievement in itself. Asking them to also be enthusiastic and come up with ideas on things to do was stretching it a bit too far. So, now CJ and I plan the adventures ourselves and the kids have veto rights if they really don't want to do something. And so far that has been a winning concept.

It was also a great idea to start with something that we knew they would really enjoy - going wolf tracking. That made them more positive about this whole idea!

When it comes to coming up with ideas on what to do, I read a lot of other "microadventure" blogs to get inspired. When I mention our project to people I meet they also have ideas to share. We just got an offer to go sailing in the summer with a collegue in the archipelago south of Stockholm - sounds like that could be one of our adventures! And I hope our blog readers will come up with even more ideas!

For keeping track of the planning, we have an analog planning tool - our whiteboard! Works great! We actually use the whiteboard for planning everything that a busy family needs to keep track of, and now there's a special section on the board for our microadventures. I also use Evernote for keeping my notes, links, ideas all in one place. Did I mention that we have two project managers in this family?

What's your best planning advice? Our kids would say "don't plan too much - there must be room for spontaneity as well!"

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Finalister Light my fire tävling!!

Idag vid en presskonferens i München på ISPO-mässan så blev det officiellt att Team Vildmark är en av sju finalister till Light my fires sponsortävling för 2013! Vi skickade in en ansökan mest på skoj, vi hade ju ändå planerat ett år med spännande äventyr som vanligt. Light my fire skrev i beskrivningen till tävlingen "Who's to say what qualifies as an adventure? It can be big or small." Och jag antar att vi kvalar in som bidrag för "small adventures" :-) Bland de andra finalisterna har vi killarna som ska ro över Atlanten, killen som ska cykla över hela världen och en "storm-chaser" från Kanada, spontant känns vi lite som de udda fåglarna i de här sällskapet, men det ska bli kul att följa allas äventyr.

Så här skrev jag i vår ansökan:

Team Vildmark adventures are about the small adventures right around the corner, making time in our everyday life for exploring new things. Our kids are now teenagers and have lot's of activities so we spend less time as a family. The challenge for 2013 is to make sure that we have more time together and include more outdoor adventures in our life.

The plan is to go on at least one adventure each month. An adventure for us means that we do something outdoors, experience something new and have fun!

Tävlingen innebär att vi bloggar om våra äventyr på Light my fires äventyrsblogg. I slutet av året utses en vinnare som får pengar för att finansiera ett ännu större äventyr för 2014. Vet inte riktigt ännu vad vårt äventyr för 2014 skulle vara, vi har fullt upp med att planera det här året! Mer om det följer förstås.

Första äventyret blir på sportlovet när vi ger oss av till Skinnskatteberg och Wild Sweden på vargspårning. Nu håller vi bara tummarna för att snön får ligga kvar så att det går att hitta vargspår.

För våra trogna bloggläsare så blir det inga större skillnader, förutom att vissa blogginlägg blir på engelska nu när vi har en internationell publik :-) Vi ser fram emot det här Light my fire-året, vi vet inte riktigt vad det kommer att innebära men bra blir det i alla fall!

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