Rebecca and I are planning a couple of winter adventures. The first one is all set: down the eastern seaboard and home in time for the April 8 total solar eclipse, which will be visible from our house in Vermont.  We plan to visit some friends, then hug the Atlantic Ocean all the way to Cape Canaveral. At Canaveral, we’ll hook up with grandsons for a week-long dose of NASA, Harry Potter, and manatees. From there to New Orleans, Atlanta, and back to New England.  After the eclipse, we’ll head out again to someplace exotic. Figuring out where is becoming a challenge.

Perhaps the challenge of figuring out where to go is a function of age. Perhaps it is more a function of the state of world. Perhaps we have just spent too much time in Vermont in the last few years and are losing our taste for city living. I expect it is a combination of all of them.

Our first idea was Tbilisi, Georgia, but a few minutes on Google dashed that fantasy.  Tbilisi, it seems, teems with gangs of young people, identified as “Gypsies” in a YouTube video, who travel in gangs, loudly and aggressively targeting anyone who looks like they might have cash in their pockets. I am just not sure how to not look like I might have some cash in my pockets. Almost every traveler I know has an experience of being pickpocketed somewhere. It happened to me on a light rail in Athens. It’s no fun.

The skinny about Tbilisi had touched a nerve. In September, we went to Portland Oregon for an afternoon. We had been on the Oregon coast with my brother and south of Portland at a nephew’s wedding, so our time in Portland was a mere few hours while we waited for Amtrak’s Empire Builder to carry us east through Glacier National Park. Portland has been a favorite city for over 60 years. My grandfather took me there as a teenager. My work took me there every year for a bunch of years. I loved it. No longer. It’s too much work.

After leaving our bags at the Amtrak station, my brother dropped us at Powell’s City of Books, one of the finest bookstores on the planet. It’s a 15-minute walk from Powell’s to Union Station. We generally walk anything under one or two miles. At the urging of everyone we asked, though, we took a Lyft instead. The street drug use and number of unhoused people along the route forced the decision. We probably would not have been in physical danger, but we would have been hassled and panhandled along the entire route. Portland has become a city of unhoused. Tent cities line the light rail routes and the highway rights-of-way. They fill park areas throughout downtown. For a couple of old people who cannot run anymore and who have precious little strength, being in those situations is just no fun.  In fact, it can be damn scary. 

We had planned to spend a tad over a month this winter in my favorite city, New Orleans.  But alas, we have cut our visit back to a couple of weeks. Same deal. Sketchy street activity has never bothered me before in New Orleans. I figured I knew how to avoid it. This time, it feels more unavoidable. I don’t know if I am right, but I am dreadfully sad about this shift in attitude.

There is plenty of blame to go around: permissive attitudes about vagrancy, defunding of mental health services and housing, a conversion of our jails to holding tanks for non-criminals, rampant drug use, the replacement of jobs that require labor with technology, a reluctance on the part of society to provide real funding in areas that will make a difference. We are not only all part of the problem, we are also all victims of the problem.

Ruling out every place that might be dangerous or a big hassle has limited our choices. The fact that we have no interest in a conventional resort or cruise further limits our choice.

Crap. Figuring out where to go for an affordable, authentic, adventurous short vacation is getting hard.

We rejected Puerto Montt in southern Chile because it is too cold and really hard to get to. Rebecca liked the idea because she’d be able to visit the Baha’i Temple in Santiago. Wouldn’t you know: Santiago is another dangerous place for tourists.

We’ve rejected a cruise around Norway. Not only would it be too cold, but the northern lights would be unlikely, and most of our time would be on the ship rather than in the Norwegian villages we’d love to visit.

We rejected a lot of the Caribbean islands because they are just too touristy or too pricey.

Our current list of safe, affordable possibilities includes Costa Rica, a few less traveled islands in the Caribbean, Portugal, Crete, and southern Italy. Sigh. So much to consider!

No matter what, we cannot wait to blog about our adventures, and we are way open to suggestions for our post-eclipse / pre-summer leg.  Bring ‘em on!