We started off the holidays by flying to Las Vegas on Christmas Eve to visit some of Jim's family. Jim's Dad and Step-mom live there, and Jim's siblings, in-laws, and nieces flew into town too.
We got in late Christmas Eve due to our flight being delayed, so we went straight to bed. On Christmas morning we had breakfast at Jim's Dad's house, then we went to see Marley and Me with Julie and James (sister and brother in law). That night we went back to Jim's dad for a Christmas dinner.
Here we are with Jim's Grandma Dahlem:
On the 26th, we went shopping at the outlet malls in Vegas, and Colleen got a spa treatment. Then we went out to dinner one last time before we headed to the airport for our flight to Belize!
We flew out on a red-eye flight to connect in Miami. Even though we had a 7 hour layover in Miami, we were dismayed to learn in Belize City that our bags didn't make the connection. Bummer! We only had the jeans and T-shirt we were wearing, American Airlines said we would have our bags delivered to the resort by the next evening.
We then had a short flight on a prop plane on Mayan Island Air to Dangriga, whose airport was a small cut in the jungle complete with a drop off into the ocean if you overshoot the end of the runway. Our pilot was great and touched us down in strong winds with a very smooth picture perfect landing on the little runway. Here is a shot of another plane taking off, about 20 feet right of the edge of the photo was the drop off into the ocean, you can see that you take off with not much room for error because the plane is barely off the ground!
Then Jaguar Reef resort then took us in a van 30 minutes farther south to the resort in the town of Hopkins. When we got to the resort, we were again dismayed to learn that the zip line tour was indefinitely canceled (for financial reasons, not because of safety!), they were out of champagne, the hot tub at the resort would be out of order all week, and it was pouring down rain! Another major bummer. But at least we had each other!
The first two days we couldn't do anything without a change of clothes (you can't snorkel, swim, hike, etc in the clothes we had and there were no stores in the small town to buy a change of clothes). So we had some drinks at the bar, stepped outside a few times between the storms, and waited it out.
Eventually the next evening our bags arrived, and we were prepared to take our first adventure the next day (Our package included 5 guided adventures, we could chose from snorkeling, hiking to waterfalls, seeing Mayan ruins, river cave tubing, horseback riding, etc). We signed up the night before and had decided to go snorkeling out on one of the reefs. (Belize has the 2nd biggest reef in world behind Australia's Great Barrier Reef). Here is Colleen ready to go before anybody else arrived!
Right when we were ready to depart, it started pouring down rain and got very windy, and our guide was thinking of canceling the trip, but the 12 of us signed up to go said we would go no matter what! You can see that we were soaked here!
Once we got farther out, you can see one of our guides checking out another approaching storm:
Here is another view, the water color was so beautiful, this was 30 miles out where the reef made the water only a few feet deep:
Eventually we were able to snorkel; but because of the dark clouds, the crystal clear water and fish were not as vibrant as you would find on a sunny day, here are some fish and rays we were able to photograph:
The amount of fish was amazing, and they were all so colorful, but the dark day meant they just didn't come out good in the camera. Here is Jim diving down to check out a lobster hiding in the coral:
The next day, our adventure was the Mayan ruins in the Cayo district, which was 2.5 hour ride from our resort right next to the Guatemalan border. There were about 20 people going packed into two 12-passenger vans. About 30 minutes into the drive, some people put cones across the road and stopped all the vehicles at a bridge. We all got out to see what was going on.
It turns out this Belizian traffic jam was because they were welding the metal bridge deck!!
You can sort of see the sparks in this picture from the welder. Our guide told us the British Army built this bridge back in 1950, so it didn't exactly give us the upmost confidence in it being a 59 year old bridge built for military use!!! Luckily we were not the first vehicle to cross when they finished, we were second! But we made it across and kept going. Just one mile from the ruins, we had to take a ferry. It is a little 'raft' and the operator has a hand crank on the ferry to move it across the little stream. There is a cable attached to each shore that pulls it along. You don't see that in the United States!
Here are some pictures of us on the ruins:
When we got back to our vans, we saw that one of the two vans had a flat tire! So our guides spent awhile trying to get the spare on, then they told us they didn't feel safe driving 2.5 hours through rural Belize without a spare, so they had to go to a tire shop near the ruins to get the flat fixed. Keep in mind this was New Year's eve day at about 4pm in a tiny town in a tiny country. Things like that don't move fast! We eventually got back to the resort at about 8pm (we were supposed to be back by 4pm but the delays cost us 4 hours). The resort celebrated New Years at 10pm, then they had a TV room for people to stay up to 11pm to watch the live NYC Times Square. At midnight, nobody was actually awake at the resort, we went to bed before 12:00 too!
Starting the next day, the second half of the trip was everything that the first half wasn't. The sun came out permanently, it warmed up into the mid 80s, champagne arrived, and we met lots of fun people at the resort. There was a band with traditional local music entertaining us during out bar-b-que lunch on the beach:
They had drummers and even a tortoise shell player! (he is on the far right of this photo) Jim told the band that Colleen's mom plays the African style drums and they were impressed! They actually even let Jim play the drums for a while! They got a lot of humor out of that for sure! But the oldest drummer in the middle of the photo actually teaches the others at a class so he tried to teach Jim some drum beats and how to hit the high and low notes. They were a lot fun, very friendly, and played beautiful music for hours so we bought them all beer and sodas as our tip. The guy on the farthest to the right plays in the San Diego area sometimes so we all exchanged contact info and told him to email us when he would be in town and we'd go watch!
The next day, our adventure was to hike to a beautiful waterfall with a swimming hole.
Our guide drove 6 of us 45 minutes to a national park, then we hiked 3 miles though the jungle. The first part was flat to the base of Antelope Falls. Then the second half of the hike the trail climbed 1,000' vertically to the top of the falls. There were ropes tied to trees to help you climb the muddy steep jungle trail. Colleen bounded up the hill way ahead of everybody, she is a great up-hill climber! Jim was panting about 100 feet from the top and stop to take a break. The others in the group were still farther back, and a young couple from Houston couldn't make it up and headed back to the van to wait while the rest of us continued. At the top was an amazing view all the way out the ocean. A little farther up was the swimming hole shown in the above picture with a nice 20' waterfall into it. Here we are under the waterfall:
On the drive through the park and on the trail, our guide Gabriel (who looked EXACTLY like Morgan Freeman) pointed out all kinds of neat wildlife such as Tucans, leaf cutter ants, paw prints, etc.
We got back to the resort at 1pm and enjoyed lunch in the sun right on the beach!
Starting that day, a cute little skinny stray dog started hanging out around the resort. A lot families that we had met and became friends with told us that their kids all had different names for the dog. We named him Belikin after the locally brewed beer. Here is "Belikin" and Jim, both are enjoying life on a sea side resort
He was an extremely friendly dog and loved being petted, and was great with all the kids there. He also made us miss our dog Kylie. We wanted to adopt him, although it would have been tough to bring a stray dog through customs!
The next day we went snorkeling again to another portion of the barrier reef. Unfortunately, the only cloud visible in all directions was a 1 mile wide cloud bank over the snorkeling area so once again the pictures didn't come out great. It was neat seeing all the coral, fish, rays, etc. We came back and enjoyed some Belikins on the beach during lunch
For our final day, before we headed back on the resort shuttle to the airport we enjoyed some cold drinks at the swim up bar:
Here is our last picture on the beach before they drove us to the airport
Belize was both a beautiful country and a very poor country. A former British colony of only 300,000 people, we did not expect to see so many cultures. There were Mayans (the original inhabitants of the region before the Europeans), Omish, Menonites (Dutch people similar to Omish), a large Chinese population, a large German population in the central-western part of the country, Creoles (decendants of English and Scottish slaves similar to Jamcians), Garifunas (they are actually all decendents from two slave ships that crashed and then merged with Carib natives), Hispanics, Europeans and Americans. We were very surprised a tiny country could be such a melting pot.
The lifestyle is very laid back, the locals describe "Belizian Time", for instance if they tell you it will be 5 minutes, they say "5 minutes Belizian time, maybe 30 minutes to you mon" And if you order something it may not come out what you think. For instance we ordered a turkey club sandwich expecting turkey, bacon, etc. Instead it came with ham, chicken, no bacon, no turkey. "Don't worry mon, it's what we got right now" Some of the living conditions were very very poor in the villages, lots of trash everywhere in the yards, very few paved roads, but just about everybody we met would smile at you and was very friendly.
We will get all our pictures onto a website like Shutterfly in the next few days, we'll post that link with our next blog. We will also try and post a few videos on the next blog if we can (we took a few with our digital camera).
We also wanted to thank Jim's dad and Judy for the trip, it was a great present!
When we got back to the United States, we picked up our dog Kylie who we are officially adopting! After fostering her and then leaving the country, we missed her a lot and knew we should adopt her. She has a heart of gold, it would be a shame for her to not have a permanent home. She has some manners to work on, but all her excitement with us is because she loves us, wants our attention, and wants us to play with her and give her affection. You can't possibly turn away a dog that loves us a lot!!!
We hope everybody had a wonderful safe holidays and we missed our friends and family that we weren't able to see over the last two weeks!
, petted dolphins, petted sting rays, rode some rides and got really wet, and had free beer at the hospitality room. Anheuser-Busch owns Sea World, but now that InBev bought them out, In-Bev put the theme parks up for sale. The most depressing part of it was that In-Bev is eliminating the complimentary beers and turning it into a cash bar. Also, they had all these displays of the history of A-B, but they were all locked up. One of the workers told us that InBev sent all the A-B artifacts back to St Louis, and who knows what InBev will do with them. A normal ticket price to Sea World is $65, you think that InBev could give out two free 4-oz samples to people and not hurt their bottom line any. But that's life in today's economy when all our companies are being bought by foreign companies or going out of business.
The University of North Carolina borders downtown Chapel Hill so there is lots of action. We ate here at the Carolina Coffee House and Bar for a yummy breakfast!
We then drove through Carborro, a neighboring village that is a real unique eclectic town. The locals call it a hippie town. It wasn't quite as hippie and Berkeley or San Francisco, but there were lots of peace signs and Obama banners! Jim especially loved this restored train station and train cars that are now a restaurant.
We then drove around downtown Raleigh (the State Capitol and largest city of the metro area) and saw the campus of North Carolina State University. It is amazing that three big universities (Duke, UNC, and NC State) can be in a metropolitan area that size. There is a huge research area called Research Triangle Park (RTP) between the three cities that was started by the three Universities. It started out as medical resreach but now has lots of high tech companies, etc. The locals went so far as to call it the Silicon Valley of the east coast. Colleen read a stat that the Triangle metro area has more medical professionals per capita than any other metro area.
That night for dinner we went back to Chapel Hill to have a beer and some food. When we got to Franklin Street we found parking very tough, the streets crowded, and the restaurants even more crowded. All the places had 1.5 hour waits. We knew those crowds couldn't be normal even for a Saturday night. What we didn't realize was that UNC had a huge basketball game on campus starting shortly. We finally ended up eating dinner at the Carolina Coffee House again because it had the shortest wait! 
As soon as the game started on TV, the place cleared out because everybody walked over to arena to see the game. We left the restaurant at halftime and the streets were dead because everybody was at the game or at home watching it. The bartenders told us that as soon as the game ended it would get crowded again from everybody leaving the game. They really take basketball seriously at UNC and in Chapel Hill!
That night we met up with Jim's cousin Johnny and his new wife Meredith. We met at their townhome in the suburb of Apex (it is named that because it was the highest point on the railroad between DC and Jacksonville, FL). We all headed into downtown Raleigh and had Chinese food, then headed over to a little Irish bar for some Guinness.
And here is snow at the state capitol:
