Dennis Joins Us

This is NOT the boat that picked Dennis up.  Too bad ...  These were visitors who anchored in the lee of Great Monkey Cay while some of its passengers went on a tour the Monkey River.

Dennis had a very busy 10 days between the time Max and I abandoned him in Minnesota before he arrived in Belize on Christmas Eve.  He rented a small UHaul trailer to be pulled by our car and filled both the trailer and the car with boxes of our belongings.  On the 18^th he left Rochester, MN trying to get ahead of a blizzard and drove south all the way to the gulf coast of Alabama, equivalent and sometimes parallel to the full length of the Mississippi River from its state of origin (MN) to its mouth into the Gulf of Mexico.  He drove for 2 days and spent the night along the way in Blytheville, Arkansas.  He spent another night in Camden, Alabama where he dropped off the car and trailer contents with our shipping agent.  Only a small snafu in that the car was supposed to go to Mobile, Alabama.  However, the agent arranged to have it driven there for Dennis, so problem resolved.  Dennis also had with him his three 70lb checked bags for his flight and had to get those and himself to the Atlanta airport.  To do that, he rented a 17 foot truck, nothing else available in little Camden, a town of only 2000 people, and drove.  He spent 2 nights in Atlanta, recovering from driving about 1400 miles, prior to departure to Miami on the 23rd. 

An entertaining (hmmm…) bit here:  We knew we would need a signal booster to get cell phone reception at our place in Belize and had ordered one to bring down with us in our checked bags rather than shipping it to Belize.  We had heard that signal boosters are sometimes seized when they arrive in shipments and that we would have an easier time getting one into the country by bringing it in personally.  Well, by mistake it was sent to our shipping agent instead of to us in MN, but no matter – Dennis would get it when he went to Camden and put it in his bags.  However – you knew there would be a “however”, didn’t you?- when he got to Camden, they told him they had just forwarded it to our Minnesota address.  Doh!  So, thinking quickly, Dennis got online in Atlanta and ordered another signal booster to be ready for pick up at Best Buy in Miami so he could bring it down.  When he got to Miami, he had to take a taxi on December 23 to Best Buy and pay the taxi to wait for him while he braved the last minute shopping crowd to pick up the signal booster.  I think the taxi cost more than the signal booster.

He caught the morning flight from Miami to Belize on Christmas Eve.  After he went through immigration and customs, he caught a puddle jumper flight to Placencia where Joy, Richard, and I picked him up in our boat.  He even managed to get on an earlier flight to Placencia.

Meanwhile, I had been busy at the cabana unpacking all the things we had brought down on earlier trips and stored.  Out came the kitchen and dining ware, the clothes, the kitchen, bed, and bath linens, the toiletries and first aid supplies, snorkel gear, and cameras.  Everything had to be cleaned and scrubbed to remove 6 years worth of dirt and bugs.  It just isn’t the tropics without the bugs.  Luckily I am not squeamish, but I might be allergic to roach poop.  After lots of bleach and bug spray, things look pretty good and I am not sneezing any more.

So Dennis arrived to a cabana that was clean and somewhat organized.  We celebrated by inviting our new neighbors, Kevin and Domini and their 4 children (who are house sitting at Steppingstones for Chris and Sue while they are working hard at White Rock), and Richard and Joy, our caretakers, to join us for a little Christmas Eve celebration. Richard chilled a bottle of spumanti in his freezer and I made flat bread, tostones (from green plantains), a spicy-hot salsa with shrimp, and a mild salsa without shrimp to accommodate diverse pallets and shellfish allergies.  Domini brought yummy Christmas cookies. All-in-all a nice welcome for Dennis and a Merry Christmas Eve for all. 

Big Changes Up Ahead

It has been more than 3 months since I posted a new entry on this blog.  The death of my mother back in May simply took the wind out of my sails.  I had originally started writing this blog for her so she could keep up with me even when I was traveling.  One of the last things she said to me was “Have you written more on your blog?  I am tired of looking at that ugly turkey!”  Sadly, I didn't get another entry written before she died, but I’m ready now to continue with greater frequency.  And although I hope to meet Mother’s high standards for blog-worthiness, I make no promises regarding ugly birds!  ;-)

Dennis retires in 4 weeks!  We are in the last days of living here in Rochester.  Our house has not sold yet.  But we are fortunate in that a colleague at work will be "between houses", so to speak, starting in December.  So he will house sit for us until May.  It is not a good idea to leave a house unoccupied during a Minnesota winter; that is an invitation for some sort of disaster like a furnace malfunction that leads to burst water pipes or worse.  I will be working halftime and telecommuting until March, when I will return to Rochester until I retire at the end of June.  I hope the house will have sold by then; we shall see.

It has been a while since I described our place in Belize.  In the Google Earth shot below you can see a small village of about 200 people labeled "Monkey River Town".  The photo is rotated so that north is to the right.  Just of north of Monkey River Village (MRV) (it is now too small to be classified as a town) is the Monkey River.  The monkeys of reference are black howler monkeys that live in the surrounding jungle.  To the north of both the river and the village is the Monkey River Road (MRR), a ~15 mile long dirt road cut through the jungle that connects the village with the nicely paved Southern Highway.  Notice that MRR ends on the north side of the river; there is no bridge or other road that goes into MRV, so the few cars owned by village residents are parked at the end of the road and residents and visitors cross the river by boat.  There are many more boats owned by MRV residents than there are cars.

 

Farther north of the river is a creek called Black Creek.  The dark color is due to the tannins extracted from the leaves of the mangrove trees that line the edges and fill the surrounding marsh.  Our place is at the south end of a mile stretch of beach called Englishtown.  In the photo below from 2005, there is no sign of our place yet, but you can see Steppingstones, a small fishing resort owned by our neighbors Sue and Chris Harris.  That little spec of white jutting out into the sea in the middle third of Englishtown is their dock.  Our newest neighbor in Englishtown, Craig Pearlman, is at the north end of of the beach.  They are opening a bar and micro-resort called Bare Bones Beach Bar.

 

I took the shot below with my 300mm lens while standing on our dock and facing north.  You can just see the edge of our dock in the foreground, then the palapa at the end of Steppingstones dock, and in the distance the sign for Bare Bones Beach Bar.  Check out the link to Bare Bones.

 
A similar viewpoint but a little closer to shore, using a normal lens shows our lovely beach in the foreground (below) with the palapa at Steppingstones a speck in the distance.  Look how clear the water is.  The darker patches are where seagrasses are growing.

 

Back the end of our dock gives a nice perspective of our place.  That is our cabana with the red roof.

 

The cabana is on 12 ft tall concrete piers to keep it above storm surges and get us higher than the worst of the insects.  The footprint of the cabana is 33x30ft and 10ft of the width is the screened in veranda, leaving us with interior living space of only 20x33ft.  The area below the cabana is screened by canes.  We did that originally to hide the ugly black plastic water vats that store rainwater as our sole water supply.

 

We were pleasantly surprised at how much the cane defined the space below the cabana. We use it for all kinds of things.  We decided to pour a floating slab of concrete to make the space even more useful - for example to store our belongings that will shipped down early next year.  We will add an extension of a nice bedroom suite to the cabana, but until that happens, we don't have enough room for the furniture we are bringing down.  Below you can see Joe, who lives at Craig's place in North Englishtown putting the broom finish on one section of the slab.  The slab will be poured in 9 independent sections that won't adversely affect the earthquake minimizing nature of the matrix foundation that I described in a previous post.  Thanks for sending the photos of the progress, Craig.

 

In the shot below you can see a slab in mid-pour.  The sea is about 30 feet away on the other side of the red hibiscus.

 

In the meantime back in Rochester, we are packing things up, getting vaccinations and a health certificate for the cat, getting things like a cell phone signal booster that we can't get in Belize, filling prescriptions, servicing the car, etc.  Max (the cat) and I will fly to Belize December 13.  Dennis will drive our car, pulling a trailer holding 2 pallets of gear, to the Alabama gulf coast where our shipping agent is.  That trip will take about 3 or 4 days.  He will leave the car and pallets with the agent and then rent a car to drive to Atlanta.  He will fly from Atlanta to Belize somewhere around December 18.  The shipped items will get there sometime in January of February.  That's the plan, Stan.  Stay tuned to see how far off track reality takes us!