All Posts Tagged With: "vacation"

Maybe you’ve wondered, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you didn’t even realize I’ve been away for the last few days. Well, I took a little blogging break while I was taking a little time off work to spend with my daughters before the new school year starts. I took off from work Friday and today, making for a nice long 4-day weekend. It all ends tomorrow morning when I get back to the normal routine. So, tomorrow morning, I’ll start blogging regularly once again. See you then.

Speaking of vacations, Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun recently published a story about a little known vacation spot with a quite notorious “attraction”:

The sand is white, the sea laps gently and crowds of bronzed Americans laze in the Caribbean sunshine.

There is a cinema, a golf course and, naturally, a gift shop stocked with mugs, jaunty T-shirts and racks of postcards showing perfect sunsets and bright green iguanas.

Only the barbed wire decoration, a recurring motif, hints at anything unusual.

Welcome to “Taliban Towers” at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulish tourist destination on the planet.

Apparently, this resort is open to U.S. service personnel and Guantanamo’s 3,000 workers, the paper reports. And it only costs $42 per night “for a fully equipped, air conditioned unit.”

While there, visitors can buy souvenir T-shirts, including one decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire that reads “The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort”.

Says Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer representing 28 detainees, who exposed the “Guantanamo holiday trade”:

“Pretending that Guantanamo Bay is essentially a Caribbean resort is grossly offensive. The idea of relaxing in the sun while close by many individuals are robbed of their rights, tortured and abused is repugnant and ridiculous.”

How far we, as a nation, have sunk.

Andrew Sullivan posted this photograph in his regular “The View From Your Window” feature…

This photo appears to be taken from Xcaret, which we visited on our last cruise a couple of years ago. It made me yearn for a vacation to Cozumel, which is a ferry’s ride from Playa del Carmen. After seeing Andrew’s post, we spent yesterday evening exploring possible vacation options, from flying down to Cancun or Cozumel to cruising down there.

Alas, it’ll be next year before we can go based on our schedules, but we’re still looking for ways to get back down there. But, with the way the energy prices are impacting travel of all types — including air travel and cruise travel — we’ll wait to see how things might change between now and then.

In the meantime, I’ll still pine for the Mexican paradise!