You Betta Belize It.

I am off work. Three weeks of glorious rest, preceded by a tense 3 months at my former work with absolutely no slowing of the pace as I prepared to take my exit. The job has been a pressure cooker of time and production constraints, coupled with a disastrously cumbersome software roll-out in the months prior. I was frazzled, stressed, overdone, burnt out and in a generally foul humor. We'd not been on a vacation since before the baby was born. Certainly we'd visited the fam, and there was a long weekend to Manhattan in there, but no actual time off that wasn't CME or family obligation. We needed a vacation, and badly. So badly in fact that we took our twenty-two month old toddler to Central America.

Belize, or at least Ambergris Caye where we spent the entirety our our stay, was wonderful. We've been home for 5 days now and as the itch from the noseeum bites fade, I'm becoming even more wistful for a beautiful tropical locale. Having never been farther south than Tubac, AZ, this was a completely new experience for me.

We, with baby in tow, went with The Gus Dad, and his family, for a fun filled week of frolic. I was between jobs, so there was literally nothing piling up for me Stateside except Porter's poo. Let me tell you that having no desk to return to after a vacation is one of the most relaxing things I've ever experienced.

C traveled better than I expected, though to be honest I was expecting to be ejected from a plane and stranded in East Bumfuck Maine. They split us up for some asinine reason on the way from PDX to HOU, and well, lets just say that it's too bad for Mr. Smokey that T sat next to, because the boy was not wanting to sit with me during a grueling day of travel. And he wasn't particularly happy to be constrained in his mother's lap, either. Mr. Smokey, sadly, will have a little story to tell during the remainder of his short, wheezy life. Here's a hint: if you turn blue in a plane at 34,000 feet and cough the remainder of your lungs up when the cabin repressurizes below 10,000 feet-- it is time to quit smoking.

Annnyway, we hopped in a teensy tiny Cessna after sweltering through customs in BZE and the boy was rapt with the thrill of flying. We took off at dusk and I was dumbstruck enough to forget my camera until the light was nearly gone. The sea is a beautiful blue-marbled with green color that I will never forget. Here in OR, the sea is usually some slate gray or maybe a little green, and it's baffling to imagine that it's the same substance. From San Pedro, we took a "taxi" through town to the docks where we hopped on a skiff for our final leg. This was well after sunset and luckily well-lit by a nearly full moon. We were flying through the Caribbean on a tiny fiberglass shoe with no safety gear anywhere to be seen and it was wonderful after 12 hours in the mind-numbingly diluted experience that is modern air travel. Going full tilt through the minimal swells inside the reef, the air rushing past was still warm but amazingly refreshing. Watching the lights of various beachside resorts fly by on the left as the moon raced along the sea on our right was an experience out of a movie, or a book, or someone else's life.

Once on the island, we did a whole lot of nothing. This was by design; the babies were definitely not up to the rigorous time lines of travel to the mainland: in the air by 6:30am, back sometime in the afternoon, so we pretty much just winged it. Wandered to the closest places for lunch, local cuisine for dinner, and breakfast burritos for breakfast in the kitchen. Oh, and we had pizza delivered twice.

No phones in the rooms but we did have WiFi, which took me 2 or 3 days to figure out- I had WAY too many proprietary settings for my home network manually set. From there we were connected to the absurdity of the outside world, and were able to at least follow the travails of Britney and her stupid shaved head. Something that we did not know was that there was almost a strike in Belize Telecom. That would have been disastrous, as our internet, phone, fax, and most importantly, credit cards would have all ceased to function. Fortunately this did not occur.

The remainder of our time there was spent wandering around, lazing by the pool and drinking a variety of alcoholic beverages, often inappropriately early in the day. TheGusDad and I went on a photo safari and took a large number of photos, some of which can be seen on my flickr stream.

It took me the better part of 4 days to physically and mentally relax. By the end of our short stay there, we could already tell which tourists were fresh off the plane. The people of San Pedro and Ambergris Caye were almost eerily friendly- not terribly surprising in a place kept afloat by several feet of shifty coral sand and tourism. TGD said that is was capitalism gone wild, or something like that. Everyone wanted your business, or a piece of the next guy's business. Even the guy selling citrus by the side of road had a flashy cell phone.

I went snorkeling in Hol Chan Marine Reserve while T graciously watched the boy. I'd never been snorkeling and after getting over my fears of 1. Death by vigorous drowning, 2. Death by terribly painful shark-gobbling, and 3. Numbers one and two simultaneously, it was a blast. The nurse sharks bugged out as soon as the humans hit the water, but there was at least one very friendly stingray who nosed me looking for a kippersnack. It's a large sea creature to come casually gliding up to you, and not something I expected. For the record, they are firm, and slimy, but with a rough texture underneath the slime. The waterproof sunscreen saved me from the much dreaded sunburnt calves. Returning from the snorkeling trip was on yet another dinky boat, the Tuff Enuff, the change in attitude of the ten of us on the boat was dramatic. Before, we were a nervous group of strangers on the way out, on the way in we were quiet, relaxed, contented travelers lost in the reverie of floating weightless above a beautiful living reef with scarcely a word said. An eagle ray breached the water as we were nearly home --I happened to be looking at the right place-- and it was a perfect end to the experience.

The rest of the experience can be described by anyone who's spent time by a pool with tropical drink in hand. You know those postcards with the swaying palms and crystalline blue seas, and lovely sand? Ambergris Caye is where they take those pictures. I've never been anywhere that was more beautiful than the brochure. We all got a little tan, we had some great conch fritter, T struck up conversation with any Guatemalan woman who had a child or was pregnant (that describes pretty much all of them), and somewhere scattered in the sand are fragments of my tension, angst, and evil humours. They're probably next to a rotted shoe or something.

The trip home was mostly uneventful. The clusterfuck that has become US airport security was woefully evident on return to HOU. Let's just say that if standing in long pointless lines is a powerful antiterror weapon, then we are all safe as houses, forever.

On the trip, C learned to say "Me!" and cultivated a deep love for the golf cart, the only motorized means of conveyance on the island other than mopeds. We were not shot to death by roving bands of bandits, and the only people that scammed us were the "porters" at the airport coming out of customs, who charged us $2/bag to carry our luggage around a corner, some 43 feet. It was a blast, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat, if only these damned bug bites would stop itching.