Colombia!
George and I joined a group of about a dozen Seattle-area paraglider pilots for a winter escape to the equatorial sunshine. Colombia is no longer a third-world country with drug-related violence making it unsafe for tourists—Lonely Planet says it's "infinitely safer" than it once was, and we certainly felt that to be true. As for "third world," the streets are cleaner than Seattle's, the water is just fine for us Northwesterners to drink, and the transportation, both local and country-wide, is fast, easy and dependable. The people are friendly, the countryside is beautiful, food and lodging and everything else are quite inexpensive compared to "back home," and although English is not widely spoken, we non-Spanish-speakers were able to get along just fine with what little we knew along with gestures and lots of laughter.
I'm creating my pages in no particular order, but I'll keep them in chronological order as I ad them, so eventually the whole story should be comprehensible. This was a fabulous three-week vacation (12/25-1/16), with everything we could hope for in an escape from the Seattle winter, and a lot of really good times that we just happened to luck into.
