As you know, we spent the New Year in Mérida, Venezuela. It’s a mountainous town located in the Venezuelan Andes. We had heard a lot about its tourism and it’s supposed to be one of the better developed areas in the country. The Mérida airport is closed, so we flew into Vigía, which is about a 2 hour drive away.

The entire town is surrounded by mountains (sort of like Caracas) and apparently the snowy season is in June and July. This was the only mountain – Pico Bolívar – that had snow and I was told it keeps it year round.

There are numerous public spaces/parks – another similarity to Caracas and an abundance of greenery.

The town’s main attraction is the world’s longest and highest cable car system, which lucky for me is currently under repair. You can tell that a lot of the town’s tourism was based on this because there are about 50 hotels, like the one you see above, within a 1 minute walking distance of the entrance.

During the day, the weather was very nice and sometimes even hot. But, every night the sky was completely clouded and it became a freezing – well by my standards – 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been promising myself to do a year-in-review in January for this blog. January has rolled around twice and I’ve found reasons not to do it – mainly “I’ll do it next week”, and then ”well, it’s already March”. But not this year! I’m stopping myself from coming up with excuses and doing as I planned. Here goes:

The beginning of 2011 I actually started off really well, and had a really good schedule going. I posted about my trips outside of Caracas, and debuted my personal superhero. At one point, it seemed like the world was going berserk (has that changed), and then I tried to make sense of it from the Venezuelan perspective. During the summer, I made a journey – experienced a reawakening of sorts – and my homesickness was cured. Then, stuff went from bad to worse in the Horn of Africa, and the US wasn’t doing so hot, either. In the meantime, I managed to enjoy some of the beautiful outdoor spaces that Caracas has to offer and then some. The end of year was a bit slower on the blog front, but lots of other stuff picked up on the homefront (I completely handed myself over to the domesticity gods over the past month, only to find out again – it ain’t for me).

There you have it good people. This year I have many goals, one of which is to write more (wouldn’t be a blogger if that wasn’t one of them), but my strategy to make this happen is to write down a lot more of what happens to me. I swear the funniest thing will occur and I’ll say to myself, I should write a post about this. But then I start thinking about candy or something and that thought gets put in file 13. I’m also going to include more of my own pictures. Again, I’m such a perfectionist that I want to post only the absolute best and those are few and far between. No more of that. I’m going to share ALL that I feel is worth sharing. If you have any criticisms, feel free to leave them in the comments section

What are your plans for 2012?