Yucatan Trip

7 March 2014

After a bit of a hiatus from blogging, we are back! You can generally rest assured that if you haven’t heard from us in a while, we’re probably off having fun exploring something, somewhere.

For the month of February, we had two additional travel buddies accompanying us: Lori’s parents, Ron and Shirley. And when I say a month, I mean a month. They arrived in Belize on the 2nd of February and departed 1st of March. But of course, that’s the joy of having retired parents is that they have that sort of flexibility. They enjoyed relaxing in Forest Home (and PG) for the first two weeks of their trip, doing what I always figured retirees do but was actually quite novel to them: relaxing. If you know Ron and Shirley, sitting around doing nothing all day is not really in their vocabulary, but a little bit of Belize and they were well on their way to adding it.

I feel like I’ve been spending a lot of time recently making maps and not a lot of time writing about the actual places marked on those maps. I hope to change that in the coming weeks, catching up on this trip, our trip with Lori’s brother in December/January, the Asia trip, and maybe others. We’ll see…

We covered over 1,000 miles over a variety of road surfaces from the far south of Belize to the far north of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. We made the entire trip in Big Red (our 2000 Isuzu Rodeo) with the exception of the island legs (Caye Caulker/ San Pedro and Cozumel). We would have taken the car to Cozumel (there is indeed a car ferry) but found it more economical for the four of us to take the passenger ferry and rent a compact car for the day.

We tried to present Lori’s parents with a good balance of Belize and Mexico, beach and jungle, ruins and relaxation with approximately 2.5 weeks in Belize and 1.5 weeks in the Yucatan. Lori and I were particularly excited for the Yucatan stretch as neither of us had been (though Lori has traveled extensively throughout other parts of Mexico over multiple trips).

Among the travel highlights of the month were seeing/hearing howler monkeys up-close at the Community Baboon Sanctuary, spending another afternoon with Elsbeth at Back-a-Bush guesthouse in San Miguel, floating through caves on inner tubes at Caves Branch (Nohoch Che’en), admiring the colonial charm and Mayan ruins of the “Yellow City” of Izamal, taking in the impossibly blue and turquoise waters of Cancun’s beaches, enjoying some of the best shore-snorkeling we’ve ever experienced in Cozumel, and catching happy hours on the beach in Caye Caulker and Placencia.

More to come (soon)!