This post is part 15 of a series of stories recounting all the ups and downs of my ~6 year journey around the world to all seven continents and seven seas.
After receiving my offer with Royal Caribbean in October of 2016, they told me not to go anywhere as they were planning on bringing me on board soon.
The end of the year holidays rolled around and I still hadn’t been assigned a ship or given contract dates.
Halloween turned into Thanksgiving and Christmas turned into New Year’s.
My birthday came 8 days into 2017, and fed up that I had wasted precious downtime not traveling and still contractless, my BFF and I decided to take a trip together.
We settled on Cuba as it was a country neither of us had been to before and it was relatively close as well as warm.
As luck or life or the travel gods would have it, as soon as we made plans for our trip, I was finally given my beloved contract at sea, which thankfully began a little over a week after our return from Cuba.
Things were finally coming together.
Off we went to Cuba.
For seven days, we were dropped into a land stuck in time.
Somehow, despite having very little access to internet or English speakers, we were able to take a road trip from Havana to Varadero to Trinidad and back without very many issues logistically (aside from a bad case of food poisoning).
A lot of our plans were solely based on trusting that whoever said they were going to take us to the next city was going to show up when they said they would and trusting that we would have a place to stay when we showed up to our accommodations for the night after not hearing back from the host for days.
Being two women from a major American city with a fairly extensive travel resume put together between us, we were both aware of safety concerns, but also we had both seen and been through worse.
To us, any place can be dangerous, and there are times we might feel less safe at home in the US than elsewhere abroad.
I think a lot of people might be afraid to travel because of this notion that it’s not safe, but I’ve found that in most places, if you use common sense and avoid sketchy situations, you’ll find it’s just as dangerous or safe as anywhere else.
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