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Travel Ideas

Travel ideas described below include the following destinations: Western Europe | Caribbean Sea

Western Europe

• Paris, France - While in Paris, I enjoyed a music festival, called Fete de la Musique, with musicians from all over the world gathering in venues across Paris. By venues, I mean I saw everything from rappers with microphones on street corners to drum circles on the Seine riverside. It was a different kind of art that moved me there, though. I appreciated the historical significance of the art works at the Louvre, but I visited a lesser known museum called la Musee d’Orsay, and that is where I found my beloved impressionist paintings.
• Champery, Switzerland - Champery is the name of a ski village outside of Montreux, Switzerland. Montreux is known for its world-famous jazz festival. Champery is situated in the midst of the Alps, with towering mountainsides that dip into Lake Geneva. A gondola ride will take you as high as you can see until you disappear in the clouds, at which point you could ski to any of the neighboring countries. Or, you can trek along rocky cliffs, hike naked in the woods, skinny dip in crystal clear streams…
• Venice, Italy - In Venice, I saw a wedding proposal taking place and snapped a picture. That day, I thought I heard someone call my name. When I hesitated, I barely escaped getting killed by a car. In the morning, on a hot day, I dunked my face in the water beside the island, and a few hours later I learned that the water I just rinsed in is the home of hundreds of years worth of sewage; Venice has a foul history of dumping its dumps directly into the Mediterranean.
• Rothenberg, Germany - Rothenberg is a walled city that is almost fully intact as it was in the medieval times. I visited the Medieval Crime Museum, featuring authentic torture devices and measures of discipline. The chastity belts were among the most interesting to me. They were like metal panties with a tiny almond shape to pee and a small heart cutout for the other. I kept thinking how important it would have been to measure the heart shaped hole, because if it was an inch off, it would have meant no escape for the aimless turds. Places like Rothenberg present a shocking reality of the way life was for people living hundreds of years ago.
• London, England - In England, I enjoyed the castles, jewels, weapons, armor, and other such things I had never seen outside of a Disney cartoon. With the Londoners’ taste for the macabre, you hear a lot of gruesome stories of beheadings and such. I constantly wrestled with thoughts of pain, suffering and lack of freedom in medieval times. It helped me to rediscover the loveliness of the world we live in now, and my mission to see art everywhere and help others to see.

Caribbean Sea

• San Juan, Puerto Rico - In San Juan, my friends and I swam in the ocean, riding waves barebellied, bodysurfing for hours under the moonlight. They were “incredible, shreddable waves.” The moon was a crescent shaped like a cup, and it looked exactly like the grinning Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. Then it disappeared. We swam for miles along the coast, and then walked miles back with nuts chafing from all the sand in our drawers.
• Virgin Islands - Islands in the Caribbean can be expensive, so you may have to be creative. For example, instead of paying $20 for a gondola ride to the top of a mountain, just climb the hillside – that type of thing is usually a perfectly reasonable option. I saw my first iguana on such a landscape. I could barely see it until a friend accidentally plunked it with a rock while trying to point it out, and the enormous lizard silhouette came plummeting down from the tree limb. It was a dinosaur for sure. At the top of one hill we climbed, we held conversations with parrots, and observed the nice, panoramic outline of the island with the ocean all around. The island was St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, and St. John was swimming in the distance.
• Antigua - My friends and I refused to pay for anything we didn’t need, especially rides. Hiking on the streets on the way to the beach can be dangerous as hell, though. There are signs posted around every turn to remind people to drive on the correct side of the road, but there are lots of tourists and lots of accidents. On Antigua, most of the tourists from the boat we rode in on were getting hassled by some locals who wanted their money. But we longhaired visitors seemed to earn a little more respect. I felt like people thought we were like them, in some way. They accepted us, maybe just because we accepted them. One guy told us, “Hey, I understand. Not everybody has a lot of money.” We responded well to people like him, and he hooked us up with a ride to an absolute utopia, and also picked us up at the end of the day. It was the Beach of Eden. It was such a perfect beach that there were no words to describe its beauty or the feeling, so, we had to make words up. My friend called one particularly nice color “violetropolis.” The same friend also invented the word “splashkabeezy,” as in, “We’re about to get splashkabeezied.” There was one word I found that sufficiently described this beach on Antigua, and that word is “bliss.” Yes, I looked it up in the dictionary just to make sure, and it means, “great happiness, spiritual joy.” Bliss was in green-blue water, endless white sand, and deep-brown sun bakers. We joined a group of gals in the middle of the beach and sang a song a cappella with them.
• Gabby, a cabby, showed us about the local people on St. Lucia. He said, “We’re all right. That’s how the attitude is around here.” He introduced us to some things local people do for fun, as well as the local music, and the food. Kassava bread was a cookie-like meal; soft on the inside and dense on the outside. Later I found out that the basic ingredient is Kassava bread is the flour that comes from ground up manioc root. We tried cherry, ginger, and some others and they were tasty and inexpensive. Kassava bread was entirely different from the cassava melon, of course. Each cookie weighed 2-3 pounds, and one of them could probably feed a small family through a whole day. Gabby showed us about fresh cashews and the pear-like fruit that they grow from. We also tried “sweet sop,” a spiky green heart-shaped fruit, and delicious mangoes. Later, we made fresh mango rum drinks.
• Dominica is called the Nature Island of the Caribbean. The only thing more incredibly beautiful than the environment there is the experiences you can have while enjoying it. We swam down a crevasse, practically like a cave except you could see the opening 20-30 feet up. We had no idea what to expect, and the farther we swam, the more incredible it became. At one point, a dread locked man jumped right down the narrow crack from the top and landed perfectly in the water. At the end of a 20-minute swim, an awesome waterfall greeted us. It was almost too powerful to swim up to. Kyle swam so fast into it that he bonked his head on it, and then he and Jordan climbed straight up the waterfall. I couldn’t believe it. My friends yelled over the roar, “Cabe, you gotta check this out!” Past the first waterfall was a second waterfall, even more amazing than the first. Plus, we were able to jump off the first waterfall from above. Unbelievably, the best fest was still ahead of us. The next place we visited was a huge waterfall with a pool of water so clear that the only thing that distorted our underwater vision was a wave of ripples. It was like we were floating on air. We could see the fallen leaves so distinctly, red, green, and yellow. We swam through the waterfall to a cave on the other side, and we floated like jellyfish in the pool. I kept thinking…I could stay here for the rest of this life, and make a living somehow as an artist or carpenter. I learned the, “We’re all right,” attitude and lifestyle that was evident everywhere on the islands.