Roatan

Here's where we are today!  Mohagany Bay in the Honduras!

Watch your bags and don't go anywhere outside of the tourist area without being especially vigilant!  At least, that's what we're told.

Our adventure du jour is glass bottom boat - yay! - kayaking!!! My fave!  Well at least the kayak part.  The glass bottom boat will be extremely interesting.  And afterwards its snorkeling.  Not sure if Ill do it as I'm not the hugest snorkel fan (especially when you have to use community snorkel gear rather than your own) but Dawn wanted to try it so we got a little combo package.  I might do it with her just for friend solidarity -depends on what the gear looks like.

But for now were sitting roasting in the sun on a bus while we wait for all the latees to come (we were supposed to be checked on at 10:15 which Dawn and I were but apparently no one else was).  

We filled up our bus and then left for a 30 minute drive across the island.  These islands always make me sad because they're such a tourist destination and all the foreigners bring their money in but the islands still stay so poor and backwards.  There are dirty children and three legged dogs standing in doorways of houses that can barely be called houses.  Garbage floating in tides onto beaches where locals sit and sleep and eat.  The crime rates are high and there are police everywhere.  

And here we continue on to another resort where we're given bottled water and lockers and instructors who show us how to kayak and snorkel and tell us that we need to wait in a certain spot to be taken back to our ship.  It definitely feels touristy and "American" and sometimes you just want to jump off the bus and talk to those dirty kids and the women who have babies on their hips and the men who are trying to repair the road with a pick axe and a shovel.  It's definitely places like the Honduras that make you think how blessed you are, but how much that blessing just may ask you to give back.

And with that whole contemplative outpouring...

Back to vacation...:)

So glass bottom kayaking... Dawn rocks!  We made an awesome team in our two person kayak as we flew past everyone else on our group!  The glass bottom was pretty cloudy so you couldn't really see much of anything.  Technically - it should probably be plastic bottom boat or polyurethane or whatever it's made out of.  Still a cool idea.

Onto snorkelling.  Dawn ended up going and I just enjoyed the littered beach and the sun:)

Back to our stop waiting for our bus back to the Caribbean Princess!

Met a few very interesting people in our group.  It's just so interesting getting people's stories!  Especially on a cruise ship - so many different backgrounds and classes of people.  Most of them are pretty basic down to earth people.  Dawn and I paid about $400 for 7 days for our very basic inside the boat, no light of day stateroom.  And today we found two other "couples" (a mom and daughter and a military guy and his girlfriend to be exact) who actually paid $329 for their cruise and paid $10 extra to upgrade to an outside stateroom with a window but it was only $10 more because it was an "obstructed" view.  They said it was pretty obstructed indeed but there was at least light.  We would give anything for that sliver of light!  Especially last night it was really rocky, it would have been nice just to see we were indeed still floating:). We're learning from people like Willy and Lilly and our other new friends who cruise more often, you can actually cruise cheaper than we did.  Crazy.  Next time - we're getting a window!:)

Ah - one more... Blue crab!  It actually changes color in the sun.