belize - day 6

 Above is Ethan and the lizard he caught.  He was showing Troy when it ran and they grabbed it and pulled it's tail right off.  Poor thing.  So our last day in beautiful Belize.  We signed up for a snorkeling tour.  It was a lot of fun.  We stopped at this little island to pick up gear and then we snorkeled in a shallow area with our guides and 8 other people.  The first thing we saw when we put our heads in the water were some sting rays.  One of the guides dove down and pushed them so they swam around, out of the sand.  We saw different fish and coral.  We were surprised for how blue and beautiful the water was that the coral was all greyish brown and not very pretty at all.  We snorkeling over some coral and the guide pointed to a nurse shark.  He then dove down and grabbed it and I think Tanya was screaming underwater or something.  A couple of the other women with us were pretty freaked out too.

When we got back in the boat to go to another area, out by the breakers, we went by this island they call bird island.  There were a lot of birds and it smelled like birds too.  This other place we snorkeled in was deeper and as we got close to the reef the waves got bigger.  We saw a couple things there and then we headed back to shallower water.  We saw more of the green parrot fish, lots and lots of the yellow and black stripped fish and blue fish.  The one guide showed us some orange fire coral that can burn you.  So we stayed away from that.  At the end the guide saw a large manta ray and he dove down and grabbed it tail and it pulled him for a bit.  I think most of the kids thought that that was the most exciting part of the dive.

We headed back very sunburned!  We watched tv, packed and walked the beach a last time to say good-bye.  We were up at 6am and in the car to get to the airport by 9am.  Loved that three of the 4 highways were paved, one lane roads.  Made for some fun and bumpy travel.  We got a rock in the windshield at the very end and Troy and the car dealer got in a bit of an arguement over how much it would cost to fix/replace.  Great ending to our trip, eh?  No it was good.  For the most part everyone got along well and no one was too needy/annoying.  Progress.

Belize - day 4

 Beach day.  Saturday was slated as hang out at the beach all day.  I worked on reading a book while sitting on my lounge chair all day.  The kids swam, boogie boarded, kyaked, snorkled, dove for star fish and shells, Troy fly fished, read, drank strawberry drinks, face timed and texted their friends, walked on the beach, etc.  It was a peaceful and relaxing day.

Belize - day 3

 These are our lovely huts that we stayed in at the Parrot Nest Lodge.  These two had bathrooms and showers in them.  Other than the boys having a couple scorpions to deal with in their shower, they were great.  We also had the breakfast and dinners here and they were great.

 Troy, our driver.  Bit distracted as he was on a conference call while driving.  We headed back into San Ignacia to meet our guides for the cave tubing expedition.  We followed them in our van so that we could head on down the highway after tubing and the zip line.  I don't have any pictures of us tubing because I didn't want to risk getting my camera or phone wet again.  So we did go through these really cool caves, no rapids and a bit of a slow float.  We did have head lamps so we could look at the stalagtights.  We came out and floated the rest of the way in the warm sunshine.  It was lovely (it was a 45 min walk up the river, then we ended back where we parked the car).

Ethan, yes the child in the cast, really wanted to go zip lining.  Grant talked Troy into it when they went in to pay for the trip.  I think everyone liked the zip lines as much or even more than the tubing.  Fun times.

 After floating the river and going on the zip line we headed South to the town of Hopkins.  We stopped at the blue hole on the way.  It was a sink hole that has filled with mineral water or spring.  Then we continued on down to Hopkins.  The kids got about an hour in at the beach while I unpacked some things.  Then we had dinner, just spaghetti, in the kitchen at the villa. Then once again we were all beat and headed to bed...  till tomorrow.