We went to San Ignacio, Belize for their Independence Day Celebration. We are sharing some of the pictures. We will have more later on in the week about our trip.
Burns Street, San Ignacio. No cars allowed.
One of the floats in parade
Lots of people march in the parade.
There are a lot of Chinese in Belize also.
As I write this it’s hot here in Belize but the weather is great. This part of the Caribbean is quite. We don’t have a TV but we can get the weather here online. We can watch as the weather shakes up the world some where or some where is burning up. Right now its Hurricanes in places we like to go in our boat. We have spent time in a lot of these places in the US like Key West, anchored there for months. I fear the town or government or state or some one in power will take advantage with this hurricane to stop anchoring in Key West for good or surely limit it. The day you could anchor any where you want in the US is going the way of the family farm. It’s about over. Sometimes these event’s change a lot more in people lives than people know. Pam and I have managed to be in 15 hurricanes in our life time and I truly don’t know how that happen. For years we traveled around the US from state to state finding work to just get by on because we didn’t have the money to really go cruising. We would work some where for maybe a year or two and then take off traveling on our old home built boat to see another part of the US and not working sometimes for maybe 6 month at a time before we found ourselves in need of money so bad we had to go to work but we were in another great place in the states when we stopped. Maybe that moving around increased our odds of being in a hurricane and that is how we have been in so many. What is it like to be in a hurricane? It depends on where you hunker down to ride it out but some thing are always the same. First comes the clouds and rain. If you look up you can see the clouds moving very fast over head but you can’t see they are moving in a circular motion, they look like they are moving in a straight line. It depends on how fast the storm is moving as to how soon the wind will increases but it’s not like a thunder storm that is really bad but doesn’t last long. Hurricane can last for hours and hours of the wind just screaming and it raining harder than you have ever seen it rain. Most people agree that you can hear a change in what it sounds like when the wind hits a Hundred Miles Per Hour. It sounds like there a crackle to the wind. I don’t believe in anchoring out to weather out a storm, we find a place to hide and always stay on our boat but it’s the water that will get you. A 20 foot sea surge will mess up your hiding place even if your there trying to retie the boat as it comes in. This all just stops when the eye passes over you and you are in the eye. This happens in a very short time and its just over the way it looks and sounds but when the back side of the eye hits and your coming back out of the eye, the storm is back on quick. The wind is reversed and all that went by you before the eye hit is now coming back by as the wind is coming the other way. In doing a blog I have always tried to be sensitive to the fact some people are defended if you say some one is black or fat or a midget and I do know a fat little black midget, she’s a girl and cute, the same is true if you say anything about the police but the truth is the truth and the police can and have always been hard to deal with in a hurricane if they know you are hunkering down on your boat. Once in Florida a boater called in to a radio station, there always saying in a hurricane, call in and let us know what is happening, that the boater was a fool and he just went on about the boater riding out the storm on a boat. Remember we were riding out the same bad hurricane on our boat and what we have been called by the police is a lot worse than being a fool because we would not leave our boat. More that once we have been threaten with arrest for not leaving. Pam and I feel for all the people affected by these hurricanes, we know what it’s like but we too were affected by mother nature this week with the Mexican earthquake. About ten something at night our boat stared to move around like a small wave was coming in the marina here and it lasted about three minutes. It was just a little slow roll of the boat and we didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t know you could feel and earth quick in a boat. There is no damage that we know of here anywhere but it scared some people. To tell the truth, the roll of the boat with no other boats moving around to cause it, no wind, was just weird.
“Pamela Ann” setting in a safe harbor
This week we caught a ride to Belmopan in upper Belize to go shopping with a cab driver we use here to get to town at least twice a week. He had to go up there to pay his son’s tuition at collage and buy a computer for him.We went and shared the gas. Gas is very high here. Over 5 US dollars per gallon. Shopping here is something like shopping in the US if you only shopped out in the country and never go near a town. Most of what you buy is imported and you can only find things that don’t spoil. Fresh meat is very hard to find. What is it like to travel inland here? You come in to towns with maybe a grocery store and a few other small stores, there’s not so many restaurants in town but you can almost always find people selling food on the streets. Here you can see a thatch building on main street.
There is no red light in towns but every where they have speed bumps. Here they have a rope maybe for a ship, laying across the road for a speed bump. You see that a lot.
Out in the country it’s green and a lot of the farming is in small fields and a lot of the orchards are not keep up like they are in the US. They don’t try to keep the grass down.
The highways are not keep in top condition either and you can be on a main road and come to a one lane bridge with maybe not even a sign to warn you. A lot of these bridges were built by the British a long time before they left. They are maybe just 10 feet wide. Here a big truck is crossing a bridge on a main highway and remember there is no one checking on how much a truck can carry. They load them until the tires wrinkle.
When you do find a modern store like a grocery store in town the only fresh meat is the chicken’s in the parking lot.
Pam is showing me another chicken under the carts.
Here you don’t need permits to sell stuff so along the highway you can buy and array of stuff like bread or maybe juice some one is squeezing. If you slow down for a speed bump they may have put out there to slow you down kids will be running out to sell you something.
Buying bread on the road side
A normal country house.
You eat out here every thing comes with rice and beans.
schoonerpamelaann 