As a longtime Chicago resident, I've walked or driven past the Nickerson Mansion on Erie Street hundreds of times. But I never thought about going inside the place, which is now the Richard Driehaus Museum, until I read all the rave reviews of it on Trip Advisor. I had no idea that we had one of the country's finest Gilded Age mansions and resolved to see the place for myself.

It's easy to overlook historic sites in your hometown as you get caught in a routine, but every time I return home from a trip and feel a little sick about being home, I make a point of putting on my tourist cap and doing something I've never done before. On my first weekend back in Chicago after a glorious trip to warm and sunny Central America, I piled in the car with my wife and two little boys on a typically gloomy, cold March day to check out the Driehaus Museum.

Gallery: Richard H. Driehaus Museum

The moment you step foot in this opulent place and feast your eyes on the main hall, with its decadently ornate grand staircase and dimly lit foyer, you are transported to Gilded Age Chicago, when this was the finest home in the city. If you want to see how the super rich lived in 19^th Century America, look no further than the Nickerson mansion, which was called the Marble Palace in its heyday.

If I ruled the world, I would issue a decree commanding every hotel to install minibars stocked with $2 bottles of beer. But since that's never going to happen, you might have to go to Nicaragua to experience such an enlightened minibar alcohol policy.

I'm a frugal traveler – a cheapskate, if you will. And so I rarely – almost never, in fact – use the hotel minibar (unlike David Samuels of The Atlantic, who recently wrote a long and bizarre piece about how hotel minibars provide him with companionship). But last week while staying at the Hotel Plaza Colon in Granada, Nicaragua, I made liberal use of a hotel minibar for the first time in my life. The Plaza Colon is probably the most luxurious hotel in Granada and it's one of the finest places to stay in the country, but I was shocked and delighted to discover that ice-cold bottles of beer cost just $2 in my room's minibar. Bottled water cost $1, and a small bottle of rum was just $6 (or $8 if you wanted higher quality stuff).

You know you're in a delightfully cheap country when a luxury hotel prices beer in the minibar at $2 and, sure enough, Nicaragua doesn't disappoint on the value scale. Tim Leffel, author of "The World's Cheapest Destinations" considers Nicaragua to be one of the world's cheapest countries and after a recent visit there, I have to agree.

Nicaragua is a beautiful country. There are stunning beaches, active volcanoes, mountains, mangrove swamps, picturesque islands and just about every type of terrain you can imagine. But on a recent visit to Nicaragua, I found all of the creative ways that people travel even more fascinating than the landscape.

There are about six million people in Nicaragua but in some parts of the country it can feel like at least that many people are en route somewhere at any given moment in every type of conveyance imaginable. You see people everywhere coming and going from work or school, hauling firewood, or transporting goods to sell on the street or in a market.

Gallery: Transportation in Nicaragua

There are plenty of cyclists, and it is not uncommon to see two or three people riding on one standard bicycle. (A Nicaraguan friend swears he's seen up to four school kids on a bike but I never saw that many.) I never saw a cyclist wear a helmet - understandable in a poor country - but it was more than a bit disconcerting to see so many adults wearing helmets on motorcycles but carrying children on their laps without any protection. There are carts being pulled by horses, donkeys and cattle. There are trucks with open or caged areas for human passengers. There are rickshaws and, even more fun, open-air three wheeled moto-taxis.

I was sitting on the Che Guevara ferry, which was bouncing over choppy waters in Lake Cocibolca on the way back from Ometepe island in Nicaragua, when I heard a sweet melody drifting slowly through the humid night air like a message in a bottle floating in the lake. I peaked around the corner of the boat to investigate and stopped dead in my tracks to listen to a young man and his grandmother singing a beautiful, melancholy Christian song.

They were holding hands as the boat swayed backed and forth and I was struck by how unselfconscious the young man was. One could ride planes, trains, boats and buses for a lifetime in the United States and not come across a young man holding hands with his grandmother and singing an impromptu song for no reason other than fun, but here they were.

I listened to their song and then introduced myself. The young man's name was Janier Mairena. He was 25 and from a town called Altagracia on Ometepe. His grandmother's name was Maria Auxiliadova Mairena. After chatting with them, I went back to sit with my family and realized that those kind of moments of serendipitous bliss, bordering on rapture, are why I love to travel. I knew I'd never forget them or their sad song but I wanted to share it with others, so I went back over to them and asked them how they'd feel about singing the song again, this time while I filmed them (see video).

You can learn a lot about a country by walking into it across a land border. VIP's enter at the airport or zoom through in a car, but when you walk across the frontier, especially in a developing country, you get a window into how ordinary people and traders travel.

Before leaving on a recent trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua, I tried to research the logistics of how we would get from the Liberia airport, where we were supposed to drop our rental car, to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, but found no definitive take on how much it costs or what the transportation options are. So when a cab driver I talked to at a gas station in Liberia offered to take us from the airport to the border the next day for $80, I wasn't certain if it was a good deal but agreed to it nonetheless for lack of any better ideas (with my wife and children in tow, we weren't up for taking a chicken bus).

Francisco, our courtly silver-haired driver turned up on time, but we soon realized that his A/C was broken.

"Too expensive to fix it," he explained. "Sorry."

The reed thin drunk was just barely sober enough to avoid being flattened by a rampaging bull. The crowd roared when he broke into a nifty little dance, complete with somersaults and a crash but many were also hoping that he'd be trampled (see video). I was rooting for the harassed bulls to teach the dozens of insane men in the ring a lesson, but I dared not admit that to anyone. Costa Rican law mandates that a cowboy should be sober while riding a bull, but there is no such requirement for the spectators, even though many of them choose to be part of the action, right in the ring.

I'm not much of a rodeo guy but they are an integral part of the culture in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica, so when we heard about Expo Liberia, a rodeo and carnival that was supposed to be one of the biggest and best in the area, we decided to check it out.

As we entered the fairgrounds just off the Pan-American Highway in Liberia, a regional hub in Guanacaste, a police officer approached us with a warning.

"Be very, very careful here," he said. "There are a lot of criminals and drug addicts around."

Coping with a personal loss overseas in an alien culture without your normal support network can be one of the most challenging things about life in the Foreign Service or indeed any peripatetic international career. I've been blessed to reach age 40 without ever losing a close friend or relative.

But six years ago this spring, while living in Budapest, my wife and I lost a beloved pet, Homer, a Labrador retriever who died unexpectedly when he was just a year old (see photo). Those who have never had a dog they really loved won't be able to grasp what a deep loss this was for us but it was by far the hardest thing I ever had to deal with in my six years in the Foreign Service.

We got Homer while I was going through a difficult time coping with an illness and we quickly became inseparable. We didn't have kids at the time, so Homer was our baby. We traveled with him, let him sleep at the foot of our bed, and spoiled him rotten with presents and treats. Every time I came home from work, he would be so deliriously happy that I often couldn't wait to walk in the door.

As Americans, we've been bred to believe that the way we do things should be a model for the rest of the world. But after spending a good chunk of my Friday, day one of the sequester federal spending cuts, at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH) in Houston, I have to admit that Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, felt like a better run airport than that of our fourth largest city.

Comparing Augusto Sandino International Airport in Managua to George Bush is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, because Managua is a much sleepier place, but here is what I observed. We arrived at the airport in Managua at 11 a.m. and despite the fact that it was relatively busy, we made it through immigration, customs and baggage screening and to our gate by 11:30.

Managua has free Wi-Fi that is fast and works flawlessly. Free as in no strings attached. You don't even have to register, agree to any terms of use or sign up for anything. But even better than that, there is free espresso spiked with rum at the Flor de Caña booth. And I'm not talking about a tiny sample either. They made me a double shot of espresso with a healthy shot of their delicious rum, aged in oak barrels for 12 years. Awesome.

Where the hell is Camilo?

Those were the words that I kept repeating to myself, sometimes replacing the word "hell" with more sinister, unpublishable expletives. I was sitting in the Rancho Marsella restaurant at Playa Marsella, a remote beach that is 20 minutes down a dirt track from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, wondering where Camilo, a local cab driver who had taken us to the beach and had my $1,200 camera in his trunk, had gone.

Camilo had told me that he planned to hang out at the beach and would be ready to take us back to our hotel whenever we were ready. He seemed eminently trustworthy, so I didn't think twice about stowing my Nikon D7000 in his trunk after I had taken a few photos of the empty crescent shaped beach.

After an hour of lounging in the beach's only tiny patch of shade with a group of Italian backpackers, I went to the beachfront restaurant to use the bathroom and noticed that Camilo wasn't around. I assumed that he must have gone for a walk or a swim, but an hour later when we returned for lunch and saw that he still wasn't there, I checked the parking lot and saw that his car was gone.

No!$#@!*

I've never thought of surfing as a hyper-competitive sport. For me, it's more of a lifestyle. I'm not a surfer but I've met scores of people over the years that have rearranged their lives to be in proximity to the big breaks. I can understand why surfers might want to compete so they can measure their skills against others but the surfing culture doesn't exactly lend itself to competition.

It's more dude-pass-that-joint than let's-throw-down-I'm-going-to-whip-you, so when I was invited to attend and write about a surf competition/bacchanal called Pitaya Fest in San Juan del Sur, (SJDS) Nicaragua, I leapt at the chance to see what competitive surfing was all about.