We were “tendered” in Belize which means we had to anchor out at sea and be ferried, or tendered, to land. I had one near panic moment on the trip and this was it. I had all of our money color coded with different paperclips and sticky notes. I put it all in our safe on the ship and each day I would take out what we needed. In our hurry to get on the first tender I forgot to grab the $$ for our excursion today. Now, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if it was just the $$ for our family, but I had EVERYONE’s $$. YIKES! Fortunately, I had enough stashed in my spare wallet pocket that between the girls, Tim, and I we did end up just barely having enough to pay for all of our excursions and lunch! I counted it at least a dozen times I’m sure to make certain I had it all calculated right. So much for having it all organized ahead of time. All of the preplanning in the world doesn’t help you a bit if you don’t REMEMBER to take it with you! I’m not even sure at what point I remembered. We were 1/2 way to land though and it just dawned on me… ugh…. I would have been devestated if we couldn’t have gone on this excursion because I forgot the $$ (LOL).. that would have been horrible… chose this exact itinerary so you can go cave tubing and then forget the $$… not a good plan.

Here Nathan and I are enjoying the tender ride… this was obviously BEFORE I realized we didn’t have any $$ since I appear pretty relaxed.

This is our first look at the Belizean coastline. There isn’t much beyond this view… it appears to be barely a single row of development and beyond that you can see the pictures in the next blog to see what the rest of the city looks like.

Josh LOVES to feel the spray of the water coming up the sides of the boat.. and the wind in his hair! He loves anything outdoors.Nathan standing close to Tim as we’re getting ready to unload. We wouldn’t want him to get lost in the crowd. Notice Tim holding his shirt.We only had about 20 minutes to spare after our excursion so it didn’t leave much time for shopping. I wanted to look around a little bit, but I think everyone else was worried about catching the tender. There was supposed to be one more after the one we took, but I suppose it’s best to not cut things too close. This is the first time that I haven’t gotten a Christmas ornament from some place that we visited. I’ll have to see if I can find one online sometime.The girls worked on their CHACO tan lines. The tender ride was a good 45 minutes or so. The tour bus that we are taking leaves at two different times and since we didn’t get on the first tender I knew we wouldn’t make the first bus and was worried about getting their in time for the second bus. But, we had reservations and we were a fairly large group so I didn’t really think they would leave without us. They didn’t. After we reached land we found the bus and were on our way to the mountains. See next blog entry.On the way back to the ship the tender was pretty full and quite a few of us ended up standing.

We’re all tired… but we have time to rest a little bit before dinner and maybe even take a nap before heading to the midnight buffet tonight! More on that another day.