COLOMBIA: PLANNING A TRIP AND GETTING TO CARTAGENA

 March 14-15, 2023

About a year ago I read an article in what I think was the New York Times Travel section about how while Colombia was once considered one of the most dangerous places on earth, it was now actually a great place to visit and pretty safe as long as the usual precautions were taken.

I mentioned that to Bob (All it takes is a mention), and before you knew it, he was working with a tourist company to plan a trip during my spring break at the college where I work. 

Our main destinations were Cartagena, Bogotá, the mountains around Pereira, and Medellín.

Then, when our daughter and her family came for Thanksgiving, we learned that our oldest granddaughter was totally obsessed with...take a guess...Colombia! She had been studying it, had written a story set in Colombia, and had even learned how to make arepas, Colombian pan-friend cakes made from special corn flour and eaten as is or stuffed with cheese and other fillings. She made some for us, and they were delicious!

Anyway, she couldn't believe that we were planning a trip to Colombia, and we couldn't believe that she already knew a lot more about Colombia than we did, and then suddenly, Bob and I looked at each other and one of us said, "Do you want to come?"  She seemed pretty excited by the prospect, and once she cleared it with her teachers (the time we were planning to go was NOT her spring break), we started to process of getting her a flight, adding her to our hotels and tours, etc.

TEXAS: FORT WORTH MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY, OUR LAST TEXAS BARBECUE, AND A LONG, LONG JOURNEY HOME

On our last day in Texas we happened to be driving past the FORT WORTH MUSEUM OF SCIENCE AND HISTORY, a place not on our itinerary, but when we saw a marquee for the showing of the movie Jerusalem in their IMAX theater, we made an unscheduled stop because we have a trip to Jerusalem coming up in 2015.

We had very little time for checking out the actual museum, but it looks like a wonderful place to spend a day. On our way to the theater, we did admire a 9/11 Tribute that included this piece of the North Tower of the World Trade Center:

The Fort Worth Omni Theater was the first IMAX screen in the Southwest, and it's still the largest screen west of the Mississippi. If you get vertigo, the soaring images on the 8-story tall 120-foot-wide screen will definitely be a challenge, as it was for me. However, the movie, produced by National Geographic, was a spectacular visual introduction to Jerusalem, and I am glad we went.