To the Beach, To the Beach

Yes! We made it to the beach!

Debbie's staff were determined she get a beach holiday and took over the planning. After three days of phone calls plans were set for a Tuesday morning departure to Roatan Island and the Mayan Princes hotel. Our flight from Tegucigalpa was direct on Taca airlines and in just over an hour we went from the cool breezes of the mountains to the hot and sunny beaches of the Caribean.

As we drive across the small island to our resort we pass small pastel painted houses or cottages with all colors of bougainvilla climbing around them. They look a little like a jumble of those little "pillow mints" that were put in party favors back in my youth. The names of hotels and shops catch my eye, The Elizabethan Inn, The Twisted Toucan, Purple Turtle and Bananarama Dive Shop.

I will not gild the lily. The resorts are back to back and belly to belly along the west end white sand beach. Our resort is lovely. The pool beckons but is only about four to five feet deep and very warm, stewing in the caribean sun. For $10.00 a day, day trippers can buy access to the hotel beach front and resturant and bar. The first day the pool is full of children and families. The second day must have been the end of their holiday and we had the hotel to ourselves with only one or two other rooms occupied. The mornings and evenings (before mosquitos) were lovely. The afternoons so hot we were driven inside to read in the airconditiong.

Our mornings were spent snorkeling in the coral just a short walk down the beach and a short wade into the water. Sadly you had to swim past a lot of dead coral, victims of our human curiosity. Further out was a wonderful display of color and variety of shape and so many friendlyand curious fish. They would swim right up to my mask and seem to stare in and say, "hello, where are you from". I no sooner put my face in the water than a ray swam right in front of me. I remembered to put sun screen on all the places that would be exposed to the sun (in the Maldives I forgot that one snorkels with the bottom up) so my two days of snorkeling were pain free.

The flight back was uneventful. Coming home from a beach holiday is never as much fun as the going out is. A pictures is truly worth a thousand words and these will have no heat radiating from them and can be viewed in absolute silence with no music blaring from the resturant kitchen.