The Beach

After the mountains, we took a "water taxi" to an island called Caye Caulker where we stayed for about 3 days.

For vehicles they used golf carts and their streets were paved with sand! Every week or so they would dump sand out onto the street and use a roller to pack it down.

From our hotel room's balcony, we had beautiful view of the ocean.

We stayed in their "honeymoon suite" which came complete with heart toilet paper to wipe with--hilarious!

We were also able to visit the larger island called, Ambergris Caye. It is probably 3 or 4 times larger and has upgraded roads. They still drive mostly golf carts, but also some regular cars.

We also found a wonderful, BRIGHT yellow place of worship.

Here we are enjoying lunch on Ambergris Caye. The food was GREAT the entire trip. Unfortunately, we had to come back to my cooking. I dream of hiring a cook someday.

Both of these islands started off like this. These mangrove trees grew in shallow water and trapped sand and debris until it started to create an island.

The water is such a beautiful color and so pristine.

Things went smoothly until we tried to grab some extra cash from an ATM for the water taxi and cab to the airport on Sunday. We had left our debit card at home because we did not want anyone getting into our bank accounts; so Saturday night we tried to use our credit card in the ATM to get some extra money. Well, we learned that you need a pin number to get money with a credit card. Ooops, we vaguely remembered something like that. We tried three different possibilities, but none of them worked. We decided that we would just use our credit card for dinner and then we would barely have enough money for the next day. However, when Scott went to pay after dinner, our credit card was locked up because of our failed attempts at the ATM. GREAT! We thought about calling to unlock it, but Scott's phone that had international coverage did not work. We had specifically called and added coverage; it worked for first 2 days and then just stopped for some reason. We could receive calls, send and receive texts, but calling out was not working. We started to get really worried that we might be stuck in Belize! Scott had a brilliant idea to text his mom and do a 3-way call with the credit card company. To our GREAT relief, it worked! Also, while he was on the phone I went through our stuff and discovered that we did bring our debit card after all. Well, we learned our lesson: KNOW your credit card pin, bring TWO different credit cards, and MAKE SURE that you really do leave your debit card at home! It really was naive of us, but we learned our lesson if we ever travel internationally again.