just wanted to send you a note that we made it here safe and sound after some adventure.
picture this: a classic two story white stucco hacienda, with high ceilings, a first class kitchen, giant porch, great room, fine hardwood and tile throughout. everything all new.
anita counted the palm trees. 8 over 30 feet tall, 7 smaller, most filled with coconuts, perfect white sand raked smooth every day by the most excellent caretakers who live in their own little house out back, two hammocks, one sundeck on the roof overlooking the fantastic turquoise water, and the breakers roaring over the reef just 500 yards out from shore. a dock with two boats, we can get a ride out anytime we want — into town, out snorkeling, or fishing or whatever.
we went out this morning snorkeling and fishing, and alberto caught a sack full of snapper and a giant barracuda. mmmm..
monica’s friend erika caught a gar, andy didn’t catch anything, but had a great time, counting the giant brain coral, boulder coral, pillar, bright purple sea fans,the water thick with fish, rays, chromies, parrotfish, all the usual suspects.
alberto’s girlfriend mar turns out to be the most amazing cook and is the most efficient and discreet cleaner upper.
its amazing. it takes a little getting used to to have basically a maid and personal guide at your disposal, but they’re invisible most of the time and just seem to appear when needed and disappear just as fast.
cool.
the house is awesomely astounding, and we’re all chilling out just great.
wish you all were here.
love,
A&A
as for the adventure getting here, it seems much milder in retrospect, but also I think serves as a kind of group personality test (fyi, we passed).
here’s what happened. first of all, we are kind of bouncing around and spaced from a nice couple of days on the beach in montauk and a wedding in new jersey, and the usual stuff in between, and we had a challenging drive after the reception driving halfway across the state to get to the hotel in queens near laguardia so we could take a reasonably short hop over to the airport in the morning. no problem, except for queens, I guess, which seems to be laid out in a non-euclidean geometry, where no two streets meet at right angles, and two different streets are immediately adjacent and run parallel to one another with different numbering schemes involving dashes and letters and nonlinear sequences. and the hotel wasn’t really too bad at all, except for the stink of smoke in the halls that just about made you nauseous. really, we literally had to hold our breath from the door to the elevator full of philippine and indian immigrant laborers, apparently. but nevermind that, we did ok..
our flight was fine, and we arrived in houston shortly before bj and pam who were to meet us flying directly from new york, and monica who would be driving down from austin. all that worked out, which was kind of amazing considering the number of different ways that sync-up could have gone wrong, except for the fact that monica forgot her passport. hoo boy.
after some quick brainstorming, we got that taken care of by a combination of monica’s good friend julie who would be minding our house anyway, searching for monica’s passport for her and driving halfway to houston where monica and I would meet her in brenham in the middle of the night.
believe it or not, that worked out too, and we got up on time in the morning and made it to the airport with everybody and their friends and their passports, and sure enough, here we are on the plane to belize.
here’s where the real fun started, because its a pretty good hike from the airport to belize city, to the crowded third world ferry dock, to the two hour ferry ride out to the caye. we could have saved some time and taken a puddle jumper over, but it was a bit more expensive, and we all know anita’s feelings about little planes. fortunately the weather was fine, we were in good spirits, and there’s few things a smile and a good slathering of money won’t solve.
the ride was nice, though a bit long, and finally, the dock at san pedro came into view. everybody off. it was hot, but here was some shade and even a bar. let’s go inside, have a bite and a drink, while I call alberto.
no answer. no answer again. no ring. what the?
no one had heard of him or the place where we were staying (it wasn’t a resort, but a new house, well out of town and far up the beach, we think. we’re not quite sure. they don’t exactly have street numbers out here).
this interval of uncertainty was challenging, and compounded by the fact that anita was not well, and couldn’t venture very far from a bathroom, and naturally she was quite cranky.
the kids were great, calm and chipper, self-reliant and helpful. I was very proud of them.
and I was ok too, thank you very much, after exploring hiring a water taxi (which would have been pretty expensive), I was advised to wait for the three o’clock shuttle, filled with locals and driven by a sort of blustery young man who thought he might know the house we were looking for, after we showed him the picture we had printed off the internet.
scanning house after house, nestled among the coconut palms, for perhaps five miles, the resorts began to thin out, and we were practically the only folks left on the boat. and I was considering contingency plans. there appeared to be plenty of places we could stay, a little inconvenience, maybe, but no panic.
finally, “there it is!” we all shouted just about at once, and circling around, the boat driver dropped us all off at the dock. Thanks and a tip and off he tooled into his own little world.
the place looked fabulous, but there was no sign of life anywhere.
“where’s the nearest bathroom, do you think?” Anita asked.
wandering around back, I found who I later would learn was Mar, and Alberto’s brother, and explained who we were.
“Oh!” She apologized, and explained that Alberto was under the impression that we would be arriving at the airport, and that he had a new cell phone number, that no one had told us…so we were calling his old number that had been disconnected, and they were beginning to worry where we were. They spent the rest of the week trying to make it up to us. I think they succeeded.
So.
Remember this lesson: In adversity, stay calm. Stay clear. Smile. Be generous. Have faith, but also have a contingency plan. You never know what may go wrong, but things have a way of working out.