Where to fly from Miami for ±6 days?

July 24, 2017 11:05 AM

My wife and I will be in Miami visiting family in early October. We want to spend around 6-7 days in central America/the caribbean, not in a resort. With special snowflakey details.

Things to consider:
1. We like culture, food, colors, music, people, markets.
2. This is sort of our honeymoon so we want to splurge a bit when possible (nice hotel, close to the beach, etc.)
3. I spent four months in Central America a few years ago. This led me to check out Oaxaca and San Cristobal in Mexico, but getting there through Mexico City would take up a half day of travel and we don't have that kind of time.
4. I am a queer female married to a woman, so overtly anti-LGBT places would make us uncomfortable.

Places we have thought about but are unconvinced (feel free to convince!): Puerto Rico, Costa Rica.
Place I would love to visit (again) but wife is less inclined: Cuba

posted by alon to Travel & Transportation (3 answers total)

Puerto Rico would be my recommendation here. It's a beautiful island with beautiful beaches that also has interesting things to do other than the beaches. Definitely spend some time on Vieques, but I would adjust the time up or down based on how much time you want to spend just lying on a beach. The beaches (and ocean) are the big draw for Vieques; it's a sleepy little island, otherwise.

If what you are primarily interested in is hanging on the beach with a cocktail, there are lots of great islands in the Caribbean to go to. If you're interested in more than that, I'd stick to the larger places (e.g. Cuba, Jamaica, PR, DR, etc).
posted by Betelgeuse at 11:43 AM on July 24, 2017

I have looked into this a lot since my parents have a house in South Florida and I visit them every winter and am trying to tack on a warm vacation onto these trips as often as I can. (If you look at my history, you'll see a similar question I asked last year - I wound up going to Isla Holbox, which I don't think would fit what you are looking for) Some ideas:

- Seconding Puerto Rico. You could do well splitting your time between San Juan, which is great for food, culture, color, and music, and Vieques or Culebra, which (I hear) are nice for laid-back beach vacation. Or if you don't want to break it up, you could stay in San Juan for the whole time - the Ocean Park neighborhood is right next to a surprisingly quiet and nice city beach and there are lots of great things to do in San Juan or nice day trips.

- Where have you been in Central America? A lot of people have been there but not to Nicaragua, which I loved. Super-interesting culture, lots to see and do. But the flights are probably just as bad as Oaxaca.

- One area I looked into was the Yucatan peninsula. If you're not looking for a beach vacation, you could spend a week in Merida or Valladolid and get your fill of culture, markets and food. If you do want some beach, it's hard to get away from the resort scene, but there are some options like Puerto Morelos.

One sort of disappointing thing I found was that there indeed weren't a lot of direct flights from Miami to non-Cancun Mexico or Central America. I think most of those flights go through LA or Houston.
posted by lunasol at 12:43 PM on July 24, 2017

If #1 is in order for your likes, and food is important to you, I would skip Cuba. Everything else was pretty great there, but the food was not good. Well, in Havana, at least. Went to highly rated and recommended places all over Havana, both expensive and cheap (well, even the expensive places were very reasonable for a person coming from NYC), and they were all mostly disappointing.
posted by Grither at 7:09 AM on July 25, 2017