Lots of Amazing Places

An excellent month of paddling some of Florida's finest streams with friends mostly from Central Pennsylvania.  After a few days in Pensacola, we paddled beautiful rivers for a week near Tampa, then a week of rivers around Ocala, and ended up with a week back in the Panhandle, near Pensacola.   As you probably know, I'm not a big fan of big cities or touristy places, and so it was a delight to find rivers and streams that were relatively isolated and where it was still possible to be in subtropical nature and see wildlife up close.  In most of our paddling adventures, we were the only group we saw on the river.  Pretty amazing, really! Big thanks to Chris and Lori for doing most of the planning and organizing, and to everyone who joined in for this trip! I began the trip by meeting up with a couple of my good buddies (l-r Patrick, Scott, Andy) for a few days of great paddle sailing in and around Pensacola Bay Then I moved down to the Tampa area.   Our ...

In January and February I had an awesome five week trip to three Central American countries:  Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama.  The original plan was three weeks in Costa Rica, and well, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I figured I'd visit a couple of the neighbors BELIZE It started with a week in Belize, a little country (population around 405,000; area around 9,000 square miles, similar to Massachusetts or Israel, and one fifth the size of Pennsylvania), just south of Mexico and east of Guatemala.  It is relatively poor, with an annual median wage of about $4,800 (USD equivalent) and a GDP per person around $7,000 (2021 World Bank data). By comparison, the US had an annual median wage of about $60K and a GDP per person of around $76.5K; Canada had about $42K median wage and $55K GDP per person in 2021.   Belize protects over 37 percent of its land mass as national parks and reserves.  (Canada and the USA both protect about 12% of their land masses.)...