¡Hola Cuba!

It's hard to believe that, while we've spent so much time on it for the past several months, I haven't yet mentioned that we're planning our first trip to Cuba in April.

It's a bit hard to explain properly what this trip means to us. It's the culmination of a lot of late night pillow-talk, long car-drive talk, and daydreaming over fifteen years of being together.

"We're gonna go south, some year."

"Yeah... one of these days, we're gonna take one of those winter vacations."

"Yeah, one of those 'all-inclusives'. You know - where you pay up-front and you don't have to worry about anything after that. You know?"

And we'd daydream out loud together about white sand, and turquoise water, and palm trees. And between us, we were just barely scraping together enough to make a part-payment on last-month's bills. But we had our dreams.

And every year, we said to each other, Friday night, lying in bed, "One of these years, though, we're going south in the spring."

"White sand. Turquoise water."

"Snorkeling!"

"Tropical fish. Palm trees."

Meanwhile, time went by. Things changed. Husband got a much better job. I got a little, tiny raise. The price of travel to the south continued to drop.

This, this is that year.

A "dream come true", one might say without irony.

So, it's been an open secret (Mojo let it out ages ago) that Husband and I are planning a trip to Cuba next month.

Why Cuba? It was always going to be Cuba. I'm not going to beat anyone over the head with the politics of this, but we did our research, and we became aware that if we chose Cuba as our vacation destination, we could have the option of also really helping some people who have been having a hard go of things, in part, yes, for domestic reasons, and in part because of conditions imposed on them. Neither of which, it should be made clear, we agreed with. So it was always going to be Cuba.

All the arrangements are made. All I gotta do is get through Hell Week.

And then - we're going to Cuba!

ronnie