On Saturday morning, we made an effort to pack up, clean up, and set sail by 9:00 a.m. The wind was blowing well over 20 knots, so we raised only the jib and still made over 6 knots over choppy seas (the seas were HUGE outside the reef). As we came closer to TMM's docks, we radio-ed ahead and a chase boat deposited a TMM skipper aboard, who took us first to a fuel dock to replenish the tanks, and then to TMM's docks. Once having offloaded our luggage, we are relieved of any further clean-up chores; a few minutes later, we settled our account at TMM's offices and our sailing trip was over.
The beach in front of Ramon's Village is one of the best on Ambergris Caye, and offers a view of TMM's docks and the fleet of charter catamarans. Meanwhile, the "streets" of San Pedro are just as sandy as its beaches.
Since we can't check into TMM's condo til 2, we have lunch at Ramon's Village (as well as some of those yummy Purple Parrots!), and lazily wander around San Pedro, picking up a few souvenirs and gifts. At 2, we take a cab to the condo (on the water, basic and comfortable, with AC). We'd all been looking forward to long, freshwater showers, but were disappointed to find no hot water; nevertheless, it was nice to worry a little less about conservation and to finally get all the grime of a week of sailing off our bodies. The Weather Channel heralds a foot of snow in Baltimore and Washington on Sunday, so we have no idea whether we will get home tomorrow or not.
In the early evening, we started walking down the beach to Fido's Courtyard, a huge open-air palapa facing the beach which features a bar, stage, restaurant, and a number of artsy shops. A band was tuning up, so we grabbed a table as far from the speakers as possible. Fido's Panty Rippers are the BEST, and dinner was awesome as well (sticking mostly to fresh fish). Walking back, we stopped at a small market to get breakfast food, and then headed back to the condo to watch worsening weather forecasts.
Sunday is yet Another Sunny Day in Paradise, but the weather at home is deteriorating. Try as we might, we can't make international calls, so we can't really get a sense of what is happening at home and have to roll with whatever comes our way. We spend some time on the beach, where small waves are actually coming ashore; this is highly unusual for the San Pedro waterfront, but not surprising given the many days of strong onshore winds.
This palapa on the beach in front of our condo is the last view of the tropics we'll have for a loooong time...
At noon, it is time for us to check out, and our taxi driver arrives promptly. We "check out" by leaving the key on the table and leaving the door unlocked behind us, per instruction. You've got to love a place like this! We drop our bags at the airstrip and walk over to Jerry's Crab Shack, behind Ramon's Village, for lunch. Jeff succumbed to the pizza craving that had been slowly building all week, while Rick and I stuck with fish.
Our Tropic Air flight was on time and uneventful. But while checking in at BZE, we learned, unsurprisingly, that while we could board the BZE-DFW flight, the DFW-BWI flight was cancelled. The earliest DFW-BWI flight we could
get confirmed on was for Tuesday night, so we signed up for it, hoping we could do better once we arrived stateside. After we cleared security and settled in, the ticket agent found us in the departure lounge and advised us that there were no hotel rooms in Dallas, offering us the alternative to stay in Belize until Tuesday. Although another 2 days of sun was far more appealing than staying in Dallas, our inability to communicate with the U.S. led us to take our chances.
Our flight to Dallas took off close to schedule, though the beginning was quite bumpy due to thunderstorms. Minutes before landing, I make a game plan: I am to get a rental car, and Jeff is to look for hotel rooms anywhere within driving distance. As it turns out, neither chore is particularly taxing, as it appears that the ticket agent in BZE was overstating the scarcity of accommodations. Indeed, we get two very nice rooms at the DFW Marriott at Jeff's employee discount rate. The seemingly longest part of our journey is now beginning: getting out of DFW Airport
At the hotel, the staff is especially solicitous towards us after all, they are taking care of someone from corporate headquarters. But the hotel, as attractive as it is, seems to be a part of the vast megalopolis that is DFW, and it seems that, much like in the movie "Groundhog Day," we can never escape the endlessly repeating loop that is the airport area. This feeling is compounded by the fact that we are wearing the same clothes for several days running, since none of us has anything more substantial to wear than the outfits we traveled south in (I did eventually pick up a pair of tennis shoes - since my Tevas were NOT the shoes to wear in the snow - and a sweater).
And so we spend the next few days doing the same thing: watching the Weather Channel, following airport status, checking flights with American Airlines, driving to nearby restaurants for meals or grabbing snacks in the Concierge lounge of the hotel, and yes, wearing the same clothes. (We did sneak out to visit Dallas' West End, but it wasn't particularly inspiring). Finally, on Tuesday, BWI re-opens at 3:00 p.m., so we try to escape the endlessly repeating loop and head for the airport.
We try to stand-by on the 5:30 p.m. flight to BWI, but the stand-by list is 2 pages long before it even gets to our names. The 7:30 flight gets cancelled. And the 9:17 a.m. flight we are confirmed on FINALLY leaves DFW close to 1:00 a.m. We arrive home around 4:30 a.m., to a landscape barely recognizable as the home we left 12 days before, buried as it is under 2 feet of snow.
What a scene to come home to -- over 2 feet of snow!
Thankfully, the warm afterglow of our Belizean journey carried us through the next few challenging days. And as annoying as it was to have our journey delayed, both southbound and northbound, we know we were lucky to have the wherewithal to make comfortable even fun alternate arrangements for ourselves, when others have ended up sleeping in airports. Of course, while I have learned how to solve travel problems on the fly, it seems that those problems occur with disturbing regularity on my adventures!
