40 Years Together

On December 30, 2017 we celebrated 40 years of marriage.  Wow!  Hard to believe!  We didn't party much on the day itself--dinner and a spa date.  Life was too full.  But we carved out ten days to celebrate the end of January.  We considered a few different places to go / things to do.  Shelly's priority was that it be warm, and even our old neighborhood in Miami has a bit of a cool-down in January. So we looked farther south, and settled on Belize.  Neither of us had ever been there and friends from Central America had recently recommended it.  It's not a long trip, but it's in the tropics and warm through the winter.

Fresh off the dock in Caye Caulker

Belize is the only English speaking country in Central or South America.  Not that that was a factor, but it made it interesting.  It used to be called British Honduras, and there is still a bit of British culture spilling down from the days of the Mahogany plantations of colonial days. We heard about the same percentage of English and Spanish with a bit of Creole and even some Chinese (they seemed to own all the grocery stores).  Tourists came from all over.

We wanted to be alone and rest, which can be hard to pull off in a touristy destination.  We ended up on an island off the coast called Caye Caulker.  We got a little beach house at the end of the island a few miles from town, and it was just what we had hoped for.  Inexpensive, quiet, hammocks, with a 3rd floor view of the ocean. Look it up on VRBO!  It's called the Indigo Pearl, right at the southern end of the island.  It's off grid, with wind and solar power, and a rain water cistern.

There are no paved roads and no cars on the island (okay, the police have one) so you get around on foot, bicycle and golf-cart-taxi.  A few thousand people live there year-round, and there are usually as many tourists as locals.  Our pattern was to have breakfast on the balcony-porch and have lunch in town.  We never did the bike trip back and forth to town at night, happy to hang out and watch the sundown from our perch above the palm trees.

Belize has the 2nd longest tropical reef on the planet.  It's about a mile off the beach of Caye Caulker.  Shelly wasn't up for the weather the day I booked snorkeling trips, so I went alone.  She made the right choice.  It was a windy, rainy day and all the ladies on my boat were purple from the cold.  But it was a spectacular experience, and I'm glad I went.

Unseasonably, it rained a good bit while we were there.   It didn't bother us in the least.  The temperature dropped a bit below ideal, but it made for great naps and accentuated the isolation of our retreat.

Our lives are full of travel these days.  We are grateful when we get to travel together, about half the time.  It's getting harder and harder to be apart.  We didn't anticipate that, but we should have.  What else would you expect after years of building a life together? We are truly blessed!