One of my favorite times to leave the country is during the week of Thanksgiving. Not only do you get vacation days that you can build around (leave the Friday before and come back the Sunday after = only 3 vacation days for a 9-day trip), you’ll also find that international flights leaving the US are usually pretty affordable to boot. Booking that $400 roundtrip flight to Barcelona for Thanksgiving surely beats $700 to get home to Kansas City, n’est-ce pas?
This year, we decided to cash in some orphaned AirFrance miles and booked ourselves a quick trip to Panama on COPA Airlines, who offer daily non-stop flights from Boston. These were a headache to book via FlyingBlue (the flights kept disappearing during the booking process, or tripling in cost), but perseverance paid off after a few days of attempts.
Since I won’t be taking any vacation days for this trip (used them all up on a month in Asia for the honeymoon), this is going to be a bit of a whirlwind adventure to add two more counties to the 50 Before 50 list. The entire trip will only be four nights and we’ll be splitting our time between Panama City, Panama and the Colombian island of San Andres, which is a one-hour flight from Panama and off the coast of Nicaragua.
Technically, we will be visiting both destinations during the rainy season (May to November), but we’ve read that the showers can be quick so they don’t end up ruining the whole day.
So, why did we pick Panama and San Andres?
Other than the obvious logistics (FlyingBlue points, non-stop flight from Boston), here are a few photos that explain why we are heading to Central America for Thanksgiving this year –
