You might not think of South America as a land of luxury. But that all depends on what you consider living the high life.

We expected the final week of our family gap year — in a small Costa Rican beach town — to be simple and uneventful. It was anything but.

A routine police checkpoint turns into a tense standoff when the police give us a choice: pay a $900 bribe or go to prison.

This is a journal of our final week driving around Ecuador. We visited the coast and took an excursion out to the “Poor Man’s Galapagos.”

This is a daily journal of our second week on the road. Our family spent three weeks driving around Ecuador in a rental car.

On the first week of our 3-week road trip around Ecuador, we give the day by day highlights as we descend from the Andes into the jungle.

Oliver, our nine-year old boy, recounts in his own words some of his funniest experiences during our two-week permaculture farm stay in Bolivia.

A mugger cut me off on a solitary street in Cali, Colombia. This is the story of how I got away and what I could have done differently.

At the age of forty, experiencing something fresh can be rare. That is, unless you plan to travel to Bolivia. Here are fifteen “first evers.”