Our Caribbean Getaway

Well we are back from our cruise. We got back last night and are still feeling like we're rocking on the ship. We are also missing the mints on our pillows, towels folded up like animals, and menus with no prices on them. But we are SO happy to be back to our kids again! It was a great vacation. I'm posting lost of pictures so I'll try to type less so this isn't an enormous blog post.

We had four stops on this cruise: Grand Cayman, Roatan, Belize, and Cozumel. Grand Cayman was our first and decidedly favorite stop. We did an excursion through Moby Dick Tours (which I HIGHLY recommend). We went snorkeling for a bit by a beautiful reef where we saw some cool tropical fish and an eel. Then we went to Stingray City to play with the stingrays. They are as friendly as puppy dogs and get really excited to see a boat because they know we will be feeding them. I fed one of them but she kinda chomped down on my thumb so I didn't do that again. We learned how to "hug" them though and got some cool pictures. It was an awesome experience. I still can't believe how cool the water looks in Grand Cayman. It's like someone dumped a bunch of blue food coloring in the water. Beautiful! Josh thinks we should move there.

Our next day was in Roatan, Honduras. It's pretty new to the cruising schedules so they don't have a ton of excursions yet. But it also hasn't been affected by the touring industry too much yet either. It was really neat to see an island with many more homes than hotels. We went on a tour of Gumbalimba Park. It was incredibly hot that day and we were glad for the shade there. During the tour everyone got a few seconds with the macaw and a few seconds with a monkey for photos. After the tour of the park our guide said we could do whatever we wanted until we wanted to go back to the ship. Josh and I chose to go back to the monkeys. We're so glad we did because we got to spend about a half hour with them all to ourselves. It was so fun. They would just climb all over us like we were just another couple of trees. We even got 2 capuchin monkeys and a howler monkey at the same time so we took a picture and decided it could be our new family portrait.

Our next stop was Belize. We booked a cave tubing excursion with explorbelizecaves.com. We were very surprised to find Josh and I got a tour guide all to ourselves. At first I was a little worried because really he could have just drove us out to the middle of nowhere and robbed us. But he was a great guide and took our picture whenever we wanted. We passed a tour group of 38 people while in the caves so it was nice to be on our own to do whatever we wanted. The caves were awesome and Belize is very jungly and beautiful. After the caves our tour guide asked us where we'd like to go, so we chose the Belize zoo. This zoo is very different from most zoos. The animals were naturally living there so someone just enclosed their homes and made it a zoo. The monkeys can actually swing right out of there if they wanted to but they don't because it's their home. It's the first zoo I've been to where I did not feel sorry for the animals. We saw the Belize national animal which is a Tapir, or mountain cow. It is a cross between a hippo and a horse.

On Cozumel we weren't sure what we wanted to do. So we got off the ship and rented a Jeep for the day. Josh was so brave to drive in Mexico. We went to Playa Mia for a bit, which is basically a beach park with paddle boats, water trampoline, and a rock wall in the ocean. It was fun for a couple hours. Then we drove down to Punta Sur and saw the lighthouse. We went on a boat tour that was incredibly boring and our guide did not speak english. Not the highlight. Punta Sur was a beautiful beach but there was nothing to eat there and we were hungry so we didn't stay long. We went downtown and did some shopping. We were wishing later that we had gone snorkeling because everyone at our table said it was awesome. Someday we want to get scuba certified and go back.

Well it was a fabulous vacation and special thank goes to our parents, who took care of our kids while we were away, and to Dane Newland, our realtor who paid for the vacation!