Belize

So, approximately 19 years ago, Robie and I, and my sister, Jennifer and her husband Mark, went on a trip to Belize.  Robie had served his mission there a few years earlier and was so excited to share it with us.  Now so many years later we finally got a chance to take the whole family there!  What a trip!  I starttd thinking about it back when I was looking at Brooke being a senior and how that was really possibly our last chance for a long time to travel all together.  Of course we knew it would be so expensive so I just started working a ton more days at subbing and making it happen.

We left Thursday night and got a call 3 hours before our flight asking if we could come a litlte early and take a direct flight instead of our short layover we were supposed to have in LA.  Heck yes!  that one had orignally cost more so score for us.  The kids were ven excited just for the overnight in Houston although already mad that I made them eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches intead of going out to eat at 9pm in Houston... heartless start from mean mom of course.

Next morning we were up and headed to Belize City.  Everyone was so excited!  It took 45 minutes at the car rental checkout which put us behind the schedule i had hoped to be keeping but I was trying to relax and go with the flow - not my specialty! The border from Belize and Mexico also took forever... like the lines were all long and then we were stuck parked in frton of a building where another car parked and locked us in.. ugh!  It was becoming clear we wouldn't make it to Tikal before they closed and I was so sad about it but trying not to let it get me down.  We rolled in around 6:30 (we had been hoping to maybe make it by 4.. um yeah, guess not!)  It was already dark so no Tikal for us that night.  the Jaguar Inn ended up being nice but of course Brooke was walking to the room and somehow fell on an open grate that was broken and sliced her leg totally open - like it was deep and probably needed stitches but there was nowhere to go for that!  So we bandaged it up good and used the antiobiotic that we had for Lauren's ingrown toenail that was super bad before we left and hoped she didn't get tetanus or somehting!  It was a much nicer evening than I was anticipating.  We had actualy even considered staying outside of the park just so that we could make usre that we had air conditioning and weren't miserable but it was the perfect night and even got a little cool (which was funny when Brooke woke up and said she had been ocld and we asked if she put on her blnaket and she was like "I had a blnkaet?" duh!  The grounds were pretty and they said the electircity would go off at 9 and then just last however long it was still in there but we had power for most of hte night at least until we wnated the fan off anyway because it was cold!  We got up bright and early to go into Tikal.  We wanted to be there first thing at 6 but it was closer to 615 when we headed in.. it was so peaceful and beautiflu in the jungle.  We didn't see another person for a long time! Headed straight to the Grand Plaza with only a short stop to watch some spider monkeys in the trees as we took the jungle trail there.  We got some good pictures but really wnated to get to "the lost world" and Temple IV in case of howler monkeys or animal behzvior there and also to beat the rush of tourists we were afraid were coming as the park opened (it opens the gates at 6, but hte main gate is about 20 minutes down the road from the actual park entrance which is by where we stayed the night).  Anyway, we did see so many kinds of parrots and other birds, a coatamundi and some funky turkey (found out it is an oscillated turkey - kind of looks like a peacock) around hte Lost World area and of course njoyed all the cool buildings and the vastness of the ruins.  We ended up taking the long route to Temple IV and saw some cool stella on the way (replicas sadly) and they were doing some construction on the front of Temple IV, so jsut headed straight up!  A little sad when we got to the top to realize you can't go around to the bakcside right now.. that is where we had seen howler monkeys when we were there so many years earlier (and of course the monkeys should be waiting for me in the same spot, right?, hahahah).  We did start to hear the howler monkeys when we were up there though and really wanted to find them.  Coming down all the stairs we were all starting to get a little stair weary but we had SO many more to go with the other temples.