Jan 19
đ5ď¸âŁ. I stayed in 39 hotels last year, over a hundred nights not in my own bed, and there were plenty of AirBnB stays too, but I canât get excited about them.
I do like a hotel, especially fancy ones, although sadly they werenât always fancy. Anyway, I have selected a handful and these are my 2024 Top Five Favourite Hotels đ¨
Please click for moreWe are in Miami tonight prepping for an early flight to Mexico in the morning. Prepping by being sat in a hotel bar drinking martiniâs and picking at a bowl of olivesđŤ.
Please click for moreThis Blog began life as a diary of my formative months living in Chicago on my own. 20 years later a lot of things have changed but this journal predominantly still chronicles my support of Charlton Athletic and my travels.
To commemorate 20 years in no particular order I will choose 20 Players and 20 Places that have left a mark on me. Next one of the Places is Los Cabos in Mexico.
Please click for moreLast summer after our couple of days in Mexico City, we travelled right across the country to visit Punta Mita on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, a quaint fisherman’s town located 40 minutes north of much more developed Puerto Vallarta.
Once an important and sacred Indian meeting site, Punta Mita is a jagged finger of land that juts out into the open ocean straddling the Pacific and Banderas Bay. The beaches are magnificent, although Bermuda’s are better, with rocky coves and plenty of water sport activities. Our daughter had a wind surfing lesson whilst we were there. I have no idea where she gets her sense of adventure from!
Punta Mita is dominated by two large upscale hotels, the St Regis and the Four Seasons, and I imagine a decade or so ago developers offered the village fishermen money they could only dream off to move them a bit further away up the coast.
Please click for more
Based on our visit last August to Mexico City, an ancient city once the largest in the Western Hemisphere has seen all number of iterations and occupants in its long history.
From the cultural and commercial centre of the Mesoamerica’s around AD 650, to the arrival of the Aztecs from the north in the late 1300’s and the Spanish Conquest in 1521. Mexican Independence came in 1824 but was soon crushed by the American invasion in 1847.
The French had their time in the 1860’s before they were ousted, although not before Emperor Maximilian I created key parts to how the city looks today. The Mexican revolution of 1872 followed which led the country to flourish as the capital grew exponentially.
The revolution ended when Alvaro Obregon took control in 1920 and from then until the turn of the century Mexico rode many economic ups and downs with great wealth disparity, particularly witnessed in the countries capital.
Please click for more
A couple of very enjoyable days in Mexico City are over and we flew today onto the beachy Pacific Coast and Punta Mita.
First impressions of the Mexican capital are not kind. Journeying in from the airport in the west, once on the outskirts but now swallowed by this megalopolis, the overwhelming welcome is of noise, fumes, and of overcrowding.
We stayed near the huge Bosque de Chapultepec, one of the largest public parks in the Western Hemisphere and an area dotted with hotels, offices and signs of investment in half completed tower blocks, yet re-gentrification of this part town is far from complete and a walk from our hotel to the park was an ugly attack on the senses.
Please click for more
An injury time equaliser from Igor! Igor! Igor! kept the Addicks’ unbeaten run going this afternoon up at Huddersfield.
After the euphoria of being at The Valley on Tuesday I was left to follow the game on Twitter at Miami Airport where we were waiting for our connecting flight to Mexico City and I had all but accepted defeat until a very late and very welcome GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLL tweet came through from the OS.
Please click for more
Instead of being sat in the Chadwick Lawrence Stand tomorrow I will be swapping bitter for tequila and heading off to Mexico on holiday.
By Tuesday afternoon we’ll be out on the Pacific west coast at Punta Mita, a small beachy peninsula town 45 minutes north of the much larger Puerto Vallarta. The area is dominated by a couple of large hotels, one of which we will make our home for almost a week. The plan is to pretty much do nothing except test the water and experience the local cuisine and selection of beverages.
Please click for more
Archaeologists believe that Mayan people first came to the Yucatan in 2400 BC. They were a clever lot the Mayans. They were farmers, astronomers, architects, artists and innovators and that was just in the morning.
They lived large, building cities with plazas surrounded by huge temples to celebrate the lives of leaders. They created a calendar, almost certainly one of the oldest still documented. The ancient Maya were essentially spiritual timekeepers, counting ticks of the day by means of sun, moon, stars and planets. Sadly the calendar reaches completion on December 23rd, 2012, which was as good as reason as any to visit a couple of months back.
The Mayans created a high society but while they were too busy lording it, the Toltecs stole in from central Mexico and collapsed the Mayan empire with the help of the desitute and made base camp at what was later to become Chichen Itza. It was these early Aztecs that set about building many of the incredible structures that can be seen today beginning just after the 10th century.
Finally the Itzaes who themselves were forced out by invaders left the north coast of Mexico and pitched their 12th century tents in Chichen Itza forcing aside the Toltecs and became rulers themselves of the Yucatan for a couple of hundred years as their influence grew south and west.
New York, New York
