To celebrate our 37th wedding anniversary, we decided to head over to the beach in Placencia for a few days. Usually, we like to travel somewhere for our anniversary, but with all the travel restrictions right now we decided to stay in-country. Even though we didn’t catch a flight to some new destination, there is nothing wrong with sitting on a Caribbean beach in Belize.

As we pulled into our resort parking lot there was a young couple who had just buried their car in the sand. So as Kelley was checking in, I got the winch out and drug them up to solid ground. After we settled into the room for a while, we decided to go grab some lunch and a cold beer. As we were walking to the truck there he was stuck again, and totally embarrassed. So I pulled him out once again, and this time he parked right next to me in the parking lot for the rest of the weekend. At least I got to use the winch a couple of times, which doesn’t happen too often.

On the beach, we met a guy they call “Plastic Man”. His real name is William and every morning he walks the beach collecting plastic trash bags. What he does is, he turns this so-called garbage into these wonderful bracelets. He uses different colors, yellow represents peace and love, white represents light and life, and black represents humanity. He is a very happy soul and really seems to enjoy what he is doing. It’s so wonderful to see someone who can take nothing and make something out of it. He told us that the day before he sold 40 of his bracelets to a wedding party on the beach. And yes, Kelley did buy one from him.

Since fresh fish is a little hard to find up in the jungle, we wanted to bring some back for a fish fry. It took us two days down at the dock, but we finally rounded up some good fish to bring back. We ended up with a couple of nice snappers, barracuda, jack, and some mackerel. Some of this will go into the smoker and the rest will make for a great fish fry, especially with the Capeador batter that our son got in Mexico and shipped down to us.

This was one of the few times that we didn’t plan on any fishing, boat trips, or tours of any kind. It was pretty much just a few days relaxing on the beach, meeting new people, eating, drinking, and soaking up the sun. All those fishing and snorkeling trips are a lot of fun, but sometimes it’s good to just do nothing.

You never know what you will see traveling the roads around here. As we were headed over to the coast we spotted a lion, giraffe, and an armadillo out in this orchard. After turning the truck around to get a closer look and some pictures we discovered that they were all made out of old tires. They looked great out in that orchard and really make you question what you think you just saw. Whoever did this is a great artist and has a great sense of humor. I mean really, a giraffe in an orchard in Belize!

While we were over on the coast there was some very strange weather back at our place. It hailed! I guess there were 1/2-3/4″ chunks of hail falling all over the place. Ruben who has lived here all his life said that it has only happened one other time. I wish we could have been there to see it.

A few weeks ago we harvested 130+ bananas, well another bunch of around 150 bananas was ready this past week. We gave about 120 away and kept the rest for ourselves. The last bunch Kelley made banana bread, banana snickerdoodles, and banana blondies. This time we made chocolate covered, peanut butter filled frozen banana bites. We sliced the bananas into coin size pieces and then put peanut butter between two of them, froze them and dipped them in chocolate. They are delicious, and the best part is that we grew everything. Homegrown chocolate, homegrown peanut butter, and of course bananas. The garden is really starting to provide us with lots of delicious things to eat.

We decided that we might as well go and get our covid vaccination. The clinic in our village was offering it, all we had to do was make an appointment and show up. We had an 8:00 am appointment and we were out of there by 8:45. Our second shot will be in 12 weeks. I guess Belize was told to wait 8-12 weeks before giving the second shot. We assume that’s when more vaccines will be available. This will really help when traveling since we will not have to do a covid test as long as we have proof of being vaccinated.

That’s about all this time, hope everyone is doing well.