After a long day of walking in Havana I was back at the apartment I was staying at in the early evening.

I was staying with 3 Finnish girls who smoked in the apartment and partied at night and an obnoxious Aussie among others.

After unsuccessfully changing up where to stay here in Havana for another night or two I resigned myself to booking one more night here before heading over to Vinales (about 2 hours away) to stay for a few days.

I found out from the obnoxious Aussie that the plan I had to simply take a Viazul (semi) luxury bus to Vinales was a pipe dream if I hadn’t booked it 2 weeks ahead of time.

Sure enough, Enzo (the owner of the apartment) backed that up.

Um, okay…

And just how am I supposed to get the hell outta Havana, then?

Well, there is a way out, but, like most everything here in Cuba, it involved multiple time draining steps.

First, I would have to wave down a collective taxi and get off at the Viazul bus terminal.   Now, of course, that’s assuming I would recognize where to get off and not overshoot my destination like I did the other night.

Once at the terminal I wouldn’t actually go inside to catch a bus cause, well, they’re sold out.   No, instead I’d have to go to one of the taxi drivers outside the terminal and grab a $25 taxi out of town.

Not so fast though!   The taxi won’t leave until it’s full so if you’re the only one there wanting to go to Vinales, well, you’ll just have to wait for 4 more people.

In fact, something very similar happened to the obnoxious Aussie as he just returned from another small city that took him 7 hours to get to even though it was just over an hour away.

So, yeah, a few steps to get to Vinales.

And, of course I’d have to repeat the same process 3 more times as I would have to head back to Havana before going on to the city of Trinidad and then back once again to Havana to leave the country.

Oh, and the casa particulare that Enzo recommended is also where my dear friend, obnoxious Aussie, would be staying as he would be leaving for Vinales a day earlier than me.

I took it in stride and just told myself life would be good once I got to Vinales.   The city would be smaller and life would be simplier.

So, I sucked it up and went to go pay Enzo for one more night here in Havana.

And then…

I cracked!

No space at this casa particulare for one more night.   Nope, I’d have to go stay somewhere else for that one extra night in Havana.

And that was it…

I quietly left the casa and headed downstairs to the wifi park outside and hooked up my netbook.

After a very slow couple of hours surfing from webpage to webpage, I changed my flight out of Cuba to JFK from the original March 2nd to tomorrow afternoon and then looked for cheap flights out of JFK to Europe.

I started by looking up places that I had been before in Europe that I really enjoyed because, let’s face it, it’s been a bumpy few days and I just needed to be somewhere where I’m happy.

I ended up finding a cheap flight to Kiev, Ukraine for just under $400 and booked it.

And, that’s it… my Cuba adventure is over tomorrow and Euro Trip 2017 truly becomes a trip in Europe.

I’ve booked 4 nights in Kiev and haven’t completely decided how I’m going to reconfigure my trip to match up the flights I have already booked in a couple of weeks.

Honestly, I’m not too worried about it.   I just wanted to get the hell outta dodge.

One thing I’ve learned with my travelling is that despite it all, despite this blog, I have to look out for me and if I’m not loving life then I gotta be able to abort mission and take a turn in the other direction.

So, overall, my Cuba experience obviously sucked for me.

It’s a shame because I know Cuba is a great place and I still want to go back and do this part of the trip again.

My problem was I went into it almost completely blind simply relying on the fact that I would meet other great people and travel together through the country side.

When that didn’t pan out I was kinda stuck as I hadn’t planned anything and I was stuck trying to figure it out on my own without reliable internet to get info.

The next time I go back I’ll have it completely planned out and probably opt for a more “touristy” kind of trip staying close to the old town.

So, yeah, tomorrow I head to the Ukraine.

Things are about to pick up…