Snorkel Paradise

We did quite a bit of snorkeling on Roatan Island. The water was soooo blue! It was incredibly clear too. I'm falling asleep typing, I'll try to write more tomorrow. :)

Swimming With Dolphins

In Cozumel, Mexico, we decided to swim with dolphins. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. I wish our trainer spoke English a little better, but it was a great experience. We were able to kiss and hug the dolphins and they gave us rides. My favorite part was just floating around and they would swim by us. I felt like our trainer's dolphin really liked me. She kept swimming by me and even looked me in the eye and smiled! :) I'm trying to upload the video, but haven't had success, YET!

Chinese Spaghetti a Big Hit

I was calling Dad to wish him a happy "Respect for the Aged Day" yesterday and I made the smart decision to ask his infinite wisdom for a dinner suggestion. I said I had chicken in the fridge and he said, "Stir fry!" Every container of rice that I have opened, since we've been back in Arizona, has been bad. So, I said, "We don't have any rice." He said, "Well, do you have spaghetti? You can make it like Lo Mein." Well, great idea Dad! :) I cut the chicken up into chunks, cooked them in a little olive oil, added broccoli, carrots, sweet and sour sauce and let them cook. At the end I added a can of Mandarin oranges and cooked spaghetti, it would have been better with pineapple, but we didn't have any. Everybody liked it. Yippee for Dad, I have so much respect for him! :)

Best Use For a Recycled School Bus

And the award goes to: The resourceful locals of Isla Roatan! :) The bus ride was great. The tour guide told stories the whole way to the beach. He has a friend with a 6-foot long iguana. Cameron Diaz has a house on the island. She has to fly in a pink helicopter to get to her house, there aren't any roads to it! Richard Gere brought his whole family on vacation with him. Then there's possibly the most exagerated (or maybe it's true, I believed him, but Terry was skeptical.) story: The guide was walking around his neighborhood and saw Sylvester Stallone walking around by himself. He went up to him and introduced himself and they went to a restaurant and ate together. He didn't have a picture or any proof. Not even an autograph. He said he doesn't walk around his neigborhood with a camera around his neck and didn't even think to ask for his autograph. Lots of celebrities like to go to Roatan Island to escape because they aren't even recognized. There aren't any movie theaters and very few people have televisions. Most of the houses are on stilts. There is a great divide on the island. There are homes and little businesses that seem like little villages, then on the other side of the island there are hotels and condos where the rich live on the beachfront property. At Tabyana Beach, I found a comfy lounge chair, had my hair braided, read my book and wrote in my journal. Terry and I took turns snorkeling. I thought I lost him a few times, he would go out and never come back! The local men are liars! They were in kayaks and would feed the fish to attract them. I was happily snorkeling about when I thought I saw a plastic baggie, but after a second look, I decided it was a jellyfish! I popped my head up and asked the local man if there were jellyfish here and he says, "Oh no, lay-dee, there are no jellyfish here." LIAR! Terry even said he saw a bunch. Why do all the local men feel the need to lie to me!?! I liked to just float and be really still. The fish would swarm around me like I was just part of their school. When they flapped me with a fin it felt like someone tapping me on the shoulder, so I would turn and the fish would all go away. Then I would play dead again, and they would come back. :) What fun! I have lots of underwater shots, so I'll probably just post a bunch and not do too much writing. :)

Stingray City

This is where the crazy people went to snorkel. Terry said the stingrays felt like velvet. He was able to feed about ten of them. Once you started feeding them, they would swarm around you and bump into you. He said one of them tried to suck his thumb off until it decided his thumb wasn't food. There was also the option of going to a town called Hell in Grand Cayman. We decided it wasn't worth the bus ride just to send a "Wish you were here!" postcard. :)

Food, Glorious Food!

I don't think I have to write too much here. There was food 24/7 and not just your average buffet fare...This was a midnight buffet. You were allowed to take pictures from 11:15 to 12:15 and at 12:30 you could eat. I fell asleep before the eating commenced! :( Aside from the nearly continuous buffets, there was fine dining as well for just about every meal. It's hard to believe, but the fine dining food was even better than the buffets! The portions were gourmet, so Terry liked to do both sometimes, what a pig! :)

Great Photography

We tried so many times to be out on the deck at sunset and this cloudy sunset was the second time we caught one. I forgot my camera the first time. I can't really explain the last picture. Alcohol was not even involved. But, there was dancing! On some nights, we would come back to our room for the night and find little creatures made from towels. I liked the elephant and puppy. We couldn't figure out the second one, Loch Ness Monster maybe?

Windex Water

The water was so beautiful in every port! I found myself taking pictures of the water just to try and capture the blues. Sorry Mom, I can't think of anything else to say about the water. It was really pretty...and clear. :)

I Wasn't the Only Freak in Grand Cayman

Here I was swimming on the good side, no iguanas over here! I like chlorine. I was drifting past the waterfall, diving underwater to wave "Hi!" to the sharks (hoping the glass was still there), working on my faster-than-Michael-Phelps-crawl, when a woman appeared to be looking into the water right under me in horror. I stood up and looked down expecting something really creepy to be in our midst when she hollered, "I thought your shadow was a shark!" Ha, ha, funny lay-dee, sharks don't bite! So, I switched to working on my faster-than-Michael-Phelps-breast-stroke...better angle to see if there was a shark below me. :)

Butterflies in Belize

I know I'm all mixed up and out of order, but I keep looking at pictures and thinking of more things I want to say. The hurricane didn't affect us at all, the water was smooth sailing. However, we did do some of the islands out of order to accommodate ships that were affected by the hurricanes. Had we made it on the original ship, we would have missed one island and had an extra day at sea. I forgot to mention what the rain forest ladies fed the butterflies. They mash up rotten fruit and cover it with honey and beer! No wonder I couldn't get many good pictures, the butterflies were all flying around drunk! This purple flower had a unique smell. The butterflies love it. It's kind of a vanilla/chocolate scent. I was tempted to take a bite, but I controlled myself. :) As you can see, the colors are very vivid, it's like Heavenly Father was using Sharpie markers instead of crayons here.

Iguanas Do Bite!!!

Iguanas are treated like dogs or cats in Grand Cayman.  Our bus came to an abrupt stop to let one leisurely cross the road.  They are all over the place!  Some are even longer than I am tall!  They appear to be very mellow and slow, yet they have a very mischievous grin.  They walk just a little bit faster than a snail and they are really ugly.  They look like something from prehistoric times and I wouldn't want to do anything to make them want to scratch or bite me.  I decided to check out the snorkel scene in a large man made salt water pool.  It seemed like a great place to take my first "safe" snorkel for this trip.  No stingrays!  (Which, by the way, Stingray City is where Terry went in Grand Cayman!)  It was amazing!  I was literally part of a school of fish.  They just swam all around me.  One part of the pool was up against the predator tank, so I could see sharks swimming just inches away from me.  I'm glad I knew there was glass there, because underwater you can't really SEE the glass.  About 3/4 of the way through the pool, I spied a sea turtle.  I was swimming right next to it and following it around when something above the surface caught my eye.  I pulled off my mask and looked up at a huge iguana sitting on the wall.  I was just a few feet away and it was just staring at me.  Then, all of the sudden it jumped right in and swam toward me.  Those claws and things poking out of it's spine suddenly were inches away from me!  I was treading water and I didn't want to turn and let him attack my legs, so I back peddled as fast as I could while screaming hysterically.  Those water polo skills finally came in handy in real life!  :)  For moving so slow on land, those suckers can really doggy paddle fast!  After a few seconds, I realized he wasn't after me, he was trying to get out to the little island in the pool.  He swam right by me and nonchalantly perched up on another wall, waiting to petrify another tourist.  After I started breathing again, I hollered at the grinning life guard, "Do they bite?"  His laid-back-island-man answer was, "Oh no, lay-dee, they do not bite."  Well, I was done with the salt water pool and decided to go for a walk.  As I passed a large cage that housed two iguanas, I read a large sign written in bold red letters:  "Do not reach into cage!  Iguanas will bite!"

Turtle Whisperer

Here is my little friend the one-year-old sea turtle. I went to Boatswain's Beach in Grand Cayman. It's mainly a turtle farm. They had a huge tank with a beach entrance for all the mature turtles, then little pods for each age for the first nine years of their lives. The little one-year-old turtles were the only turtles we could pick up. They would flap their fins like a bird when you picked them up, then rubbing them on their chins immediately calmed them down. I guess it gives them the feeling that they are eating. They were very cute and fun to watch. Many are released into the wild each year. Then what, you might ask, happens to the rest? Well, they are kept in the big tank to breed and some are sold. It was a little upsetting to finally realize that I was on a farm. Farm animals get eaten, this farm was no different. :(

Bananas

I'd like to say that this woman didn't want her face photographed and I'm a great photographer, but the true story is that I'm really not a great photographer. :) I was amazed at how big these bunches of bananas were. Each petal of the red blossom turns into a banana! I could have spent all day just looking at all the different plants! The variety is amazing. There were almond trees, all sorts of herbs used for various purposes. The headache plant is pretty self explanatory. :) They call Mahogany trees, "Cradle to Grave" trees because your cradle is made from mahogany, many things in between and your coffin is made from mahogany. There was a bush you could chew if you get bit by a snake, but it also has humongous thorns that house ants, so you have to be careful where you chew...

Iguana Tastes Like Chicken

I went to Bacab Eco Park while I was in Belize City. On the bus ride, we had a local woman telling us all sorts of trivia about Belize. Here are some of my favorites: Lots of locals eat Iguana meat and say it tastes like chicken. She was quick to mention that we would be having something that tastes like chicken for lunch. (It was chicken!) They cook their rice and beans in coconut milk, that's why it tastes so good! Two Belize dollars equal one US dollar. (I sent postcards for 15 cents from Belize!) The Coke is sweeter (as if Coke NEEDS to be any sweeter) because they make it with brown sugar in Belize. I tried fried plantains (again) here. (I've never really cared for them, but they LOOK like they should taste good, so I keep trying them. They were really good here! They didn't taste like a tasteless potato fried mush, they were more slimy and really tasty, not bland, kind of like caramelized onions.) Belize used to be British Honduras, so the official language is English. Many people also speak Spanish and they have an English slang called "Lazy Language." (It's like speaking the way you text message people.) Back when there was a large prison in Belize City, the inmates were fed lobster. I guess nobody had discovered butter yet, so they thought lobster was just a pest. There are 4 traffic lights in Belize and 3 are working. There aren't any traffic police, but there are speed bumps in front of schools. The locals call the speed bumps "sleeping policemen." I was amazed at how colorful the animals and fruit were. Everything was so vivid. When I came back from the butterfly garden I decided to walk to the post office. I have never had my ego boosted SO MUCH! Every man, woman and child walked with me and told me how beautiful I was, asked me who did my hair, offered me chilled, just opened coconuts, offered me a ride, wanted me to come check out their table of stuff to sell, asked me if I was a super model, everyone calls each other "sweetie." I was almost to the post office with most of my entourage when I spied Terry. He had some guys hanging on the fence of a basketball court asking him which team he was from. They were sure he was a professional football player or something. I did find something I liked on a table and bought it for Mom. I had to haggle with a guy that claimed to only speak Spanish and then suddenly only spoke English when we started haggling in Spanish. The people were all very mellow and happy.

Moving and Cruising

I can't believe the audacity of Terry to make me go on a Caribbean cruise when we haven't even settled back into our house yet. It was also only the second week of school for the kids! I can't believe I agreed to go! Here is a picture from Belize City where I explored a butterfly aviary. Two women from the aviary guided me through and told me how they go out in the rain forest to collect eggs, then they hatch the caterpillars in the aviary and the butterflies continue to reproduce so they are very concentrated and protected in the aviary. This is a Blue Morpho, a very rare and very large butterfly. I should have stuck my foot in the shot, it's wingspan is about six inches!

Look Who's Six!

While not the prettiest cake I've ever made, it was tasty! :) I let Luke help a little too much with the decorating. We had a fun time. The kids all took turns riding A.J.'s new bike up and down the hallway. :)

Finally Settling In

Sorry for the big gap in my diary. I'll try and catch y'all up on what's been happening. I'm going to do it in a bunch of little entries because I have tons of pictures to share. I thought I lost them all, but after a small miracle, they were all recovered. Yippee! :) These are photos of one of many ballerina competitions held in our dining room. Sariah won today. I tried to get a close-up of the football trophy covered in ribbon. Emily was also trying to get a picture of Sariah's hair and I had to laugh at the car someone was trying to eat for dinner. :)