This is a series in which I describe a typical Tuesday during our travels. This will give you an idea of what we do on an average day – sometimes exciting and sometimes mundane.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016: Caye Caulker, Belize
7:45am – Jon wakes up and makes coffee.
7:57am – Lana wakes up and drinks some orange juice. We both play on our phones for a bit.
8:32am – Lana sits at the small kitchen table and works on blog posts.
9:34am – We start getting ready to leave and go into town. We sort our laundry and put dirty clothes into bags to take to the laundromat.
9:57am – Leave the apartment, unlock our bikes, and start the ride into town. We navigate all the potholes and puddles in our neighborhood and enjoy the breeze once we hit Back Street.
10:11am – Arrive at Jasmine’s Laundromat and drop off our clothes. We have enough for 2 loads of laundry and they will be ready (washed, dried, and folded) by 5:00pm tonight.
Jasmine’s laundry service – drop off your laundry and it’s ready later that day!
10:17am – Jon stops at the bank to withdraw money while Lana gets a table at Meldy’s Cafe for breakfast. Meldy herself gives us menus and recommendations. Lana orders watermelon juice with a bacon and vegetable omelette that comes with a couple fry jacks and beans. Jon orders sour sop juice (sour sop is a local fruit that is very sweet) with the local Belizean breakfast, consisting of a stewed curry chicken, fry jacks, and beans. While waiting for our breakfast, we fill out some postcards to our family and friends. Each breakfast is delicious and we kick ourselves for not eating here before!
My breakfast at Meldy’s – it was so good, I ordered the exact same thing 2 days later when we went back!
11:04am – Pay for breakfast and get on our bikes to ride to the post office.
11:10am – Buy stamps at the post office and mail a few postcards.
11:20am – Stop at a few stores to do some shopping. We don’t buy much on our travels, but occasionally pick up something small like a magnet or pair of earrings. This time, we found a Christmas ornament and a salad utensil set made of palm wood. It’s bigger than we would normally purchase for a souvenir, but we need to send a few things back home anyway, so figure that these will fit nicely in a small box. Once done shopping, we bike home.
Shopping for a few (small!) souvenirs.
12:14pm – Arrive back at our apartment rental and turn on the A/C. It gets very hot and humid here during the day so this is always the first thing we do when we get home! We lay on the bed for a bit since the A/C unit is in the bedroom.
12:38pm – We see our roommate, a tiny lizard that I’ve named Chipper, run from behind the armoire to behind the A/C unit. I try to get a picture but he’s too fast (or I’m too slow, not sure which!).
12:55pm – Lana starts writing the voice-over script for the video that Jon has put together about our time at Custer State Park in South Dakota. Jon fills out some postcards.
We have a pretty small table to work on, so it’s a squeeze to fit both of us!
2:00pm – Lana gets in the shower.
2:21pm – Lana works on some blog posts and uploading pictures. Jon starts looking up pictures of crabs online to figure out what types of crabs we have in our yard here on the island. The final consensus is blue crab, although the crabs in our yard aren’t blue.
3:41pm – We fill out our dive log books from our scuba dive the previous day. Lana writes in her journal.
4:15pm – Jon walks to the small neighborhood store approximately 4 houses away from ours. He buys a small jug of water and orange juice.
This is the small grocery store by our apartment where we buy water, milk, juice, and eggs.
4:27pm – We leave the apartment and get on our bikes with the intent to bike around the southern part of the island, which we have not seen yet.
4:46pm – After a couple of false starts (one pathway led to the dump!), we finally find the road that will lead us around the southern part of the island. We bike for a few minutes, then come to a large puddle of water that we cannot cross – it’s too large and deep. We turn around and bike toward the airport, thinking that there might be another way around from there.
This is where our bike ride ended, at a puddle that looked more like a lake! Pretty view though, so it was worth it!
5:00pm – We arrive at the airport, which is very small. There is one runway in the middle of a small grassy field and a 1- or 2-room airport terminal. There are kids hanging out on their bikes just outside. Since the sun will set soon, we abandon our idea to bike around the southern part of the island and start heading toward the north section.
The airport terminal on Caye Caulker – the smallest that I’ve seen!
5:15pm – We stop at Frenchie’s Dive Shop to have them stamp our log book and ask them a few questions about our dive from yesterday. They greet us by name since we have been there so often in the past 2 weeks! We will miss them once we leave!
5:21pm – We stop on the west part of the island to watch the sunset. It’s beautiful – probably the best that we’ve seen our entire time on the island!
A beautiful sunset from the west side of Caye Caulker.
5:28pm – We bike to the Lazy Lizard, the restaurant/bar at the northern tip of the island called The Split. We sit at a picnic table that looks out over the water and order a happy hour rum punch drink and an order of chicken nachos. The nachos are loaded with toppings so we have to use a spoon to eat them!
The bar at the Lazy Lizard, where we had happy hour drinks and some nachos!
6:18pm – We aren’t very hungry for dinner since the nachos were so filling, so make the decision to head home. We get on our bikes and start biking south.
6:27pm – We stop at Jasmine’s Laundromat to pick up our clothes, which are folded nice and neat in a large bag. The bag barely fits in the basket on Jon’s bike! We bike the rest of the way home.
We wear our headlamps at night when biking around, since there aren’t streetlights everywhere on the island and we need to be able to see the potholes and puddles.
6:42pm – We arrive home and put away the laundry.
6:48pm – Lana finishes filling out the dive log book from yesterday’s dive.
7:03pm – We turn on the World Series Game 1, which comes in Spanish on our tv. It’s the 5th inning so we still have half the game to watch.
Dessert for me! Popcorn while watching the World Series!
8:13pm – We want a snack so each have a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerio’s for dinner.
9:48pm – The game ends (Cubs lost, boo!) so Lana gets ready for bed. Jon plays video games for a bit before going to bed as well.