Dalliance's Journey: February 2012

Marc & Alex on our veranda

Welcome back to Dalliance's journey! I know it's been a long time since our last post but we've been very active over the past few months. Our son Marc and his girlfriend Alex visited us for a week in early November. We packed a lot of activity into those 7 days. The Belize Zoo, the ruins at Lamanai, the baboon sanctuary, cave tubing, zip lining, a couple of days on Caye Caulker fishing and
snorkeling gave Alex and Marc a look

Fresh fish dinner we caught

at the best Belize has to offer.

Zipline Tour

Belize Zoo

Sailing/snorkel trip with Juni

Climbing Lamanai

Cave Tubing

Alex feeds a baby howler monkey

Kris and I travelled back to central New York for the holidays leaving on December 8th and returning on January 4th. We booked our flights out of Cancun Mexico. This was the first time we went through Mexico to fly home. We normally fly in and out of Phillip Goodson International airport in Belize City but flight schedules and costs have become increasingly prohibitive.
We decided to try Cancun and spend a few days exploring the Mayan Riviera on our drive up and back. A round trip flight from Belize City to Syracuse would cost approximately $1650 for both Kris and I. On the return flight we would have had an overnight lay over in Atlanta (not fun). Our round trip tickets out of Cancun cost us $1050 and the flight was direct to JFK and then a short hop on to Syracuse. We were able to get very nice accommodations two blocks from the white sand beaches of Playa Del Carmen for $56 per night before the holidays and $66 per night after January 1st. Off season rates are available until the middle of December which marks the beginning of the peak tourist season on the Mayan Riviera.

Playa Del Carmen

Shuttle buses take you directly from Playa Del Carmen to the Cancun International airport in about 45 minutes. The trip up and back was very relaxing on comfortable Coaches that had movies to entertain you on the 5 hour ride from Chetumal to Playa Del Carmen. A taxi took us the 15 miles from our home across the border to the bus station in Chetumal Mexico. We liked it so much we are taking the same route when we return to Dalliance on March 20th. Upon our return to our Belizean "digs" we continued to peck away on the house. Small projects such as installing towel bars, coat hooks, window blinds and painting have kept us occupied over the past month. Our next door neighbors to the south arrived last week and we've spent some quality time getting to know each other. Dave and Wendy are wonderful people and we're thankful we have them for neighbors. By way of follow up to our post "Life In Belize" we're including some photos of private residences located in the Mayan Seaside, Consejo Shores and Wagner's Landing residential developments in the Consejo area. As I mentioned previously we are rejoining Dalliance at the marina in Indiantown Florida on March 20th. We expect to spend two weeks getting Dalliance ready for a return trip to Fair Haven Yacht Club back in good old New York. We plan to spend the summer living aboard Dalliance. Our dock mates for over ten years Sam and Barb Servadio will spend the summer with us living aboard their sailing yacht "The Summer Wind". We're extremely excited to be reconnecting with our long time sailing partners for a summer of sailing adventure on Lake Ontario. For those of you who have followed Dalliance's Journey from the beginning you're probably wondering why we're not bringing Dalliance into Belizean waters. The explanation will have to wait for a future post. I've got to get back into this slowly. Stay tuned there's alot more adventure to come. Enjoy the pictures that follow.