Photos of Our Belize Trip

We went to Belize for a friend's wedding in Hopkins and stayed at the Almond Beach Resort.  We decided to go a few days early and stay on Caye Caulker to go scuba diving on the barrier reef.  We stayed at the Seaside Cabanas there.  We really loved Caye Caulker.  

Here are some of my favorite photos of Belize.  We really, really liked it there.  It's so laid back, everyone is friendly, and even the food we had was awesome.  The rest of the photos are on our web album:  Belize April 2010.  Enjoy!!

More details of our trip will show up on our travel blog within the next couple of weeks if anyone is interested.

Fresh Fish Selection for Dinner.

Walking Along Front Street in Caye Caulker.

Beautiful Blue Caribbean Water

Lots of Breeze, Biking, Birds, Piers, and Boats

The Motto of Caye Caulker.

Our Hotel (room where the balcony is on the upper left).

Blue Hole swimming hole.

Waiting to go on our second dive on the southern barrier reef.

Relaxing on the pier.

Mike was a groomsman in our friends' wedding.

Oh, and we snorkeled with nurse sharks!

Our Christmas Weekend

We stayed in San Diego this year for Christmas and spent our time with friends and Mike's grandmother, Enid. We went to see How The Grinch Stole Christmas in Balboa Park, which is an annual event in San Diego. It was a fantastic performance. Mike and I also broke in our new wetsuits today scuba diving in the La Jolla Cove. We stayed nice and warm until the end of the dive, but only our hands and feet started to get cold. It also helped that it was 77 degrees outside today!

At a dinner party

Mike & Enid outside the Old Globe before seeing The Grinch

Santa Came Early

Santa came early for us this year! We got new wetsuits for diving! They are super cool! I think we are going to try and break them in Christmas Eve.

Cruise to Mexico

We made it back from our cruise, fully rested and a couple pounds heavier! We really enjoyed our cruise and found it to be very relaxing as well as fun. We had no cell phones or internet for a whole week!! We also ate a lot of food. You can have a 5 course meal for dinner every night. We had lots of dessert too!

We had a good dive in Cabo, our second time diving there. This time we saw a school of manta rays, a sea turtle, and a seahorse as well as lots of fish! The water there is still warm this time of year. After our dive, we had lunch and then went to a tequila bar!

In Mazatlan, we hiked to the top of El Faro Lighthouse, the second tallest in the world. The lighthouse wasn't all that spectacular itself, but the views were pretty nice. We worked up a good sweat, which was needed to burn off some calories! After our hike, we had lunch and toured around the city in an open air taxi.

Puerto Vallarta is very pretty. We went into the canopy and tried out the zip lines. We also got to rappel down a waterfall. It was very fun and exciting, probably the best thing we did on the trip.

Besides the 3 ports, we had 3 full days at sea. There were always tons of activities to chose from. We, of course, had to play bingo. I can't believe Mike had never played before and asked me how to play! We met lots of people onboard and everyone was super nice. It was sort of fun meeting people and then seeing them later on the ship and waving at someone you sort of knew. We think it would be lots of fun to go on a cruise with friends, so if anyone wants to go on a cruise...

Of course, Mike and I always take sooo many pictures, so feel free to check them out here!

Labor Day Weekend in Cabo San Lucas

We stayed at the Hilton. Our room was really nice and had a spectacular view of the ocean and pool. We ended up spending quite a bit of time at the hotel. Most of the beaches in Cabo are not swimable due to the rough surf. We lounged at our pool a lot, it was really hot. Mike ended up getting a little sick the first day also, so we didn’t feel comfortable leaving the hotel until he was a little better. Our hotel was about a 25 minute drive into Cabo San Lucas, which was the only bad thing. We wished we would have rented a car.

Sunday, we were finally able to leave the hotel and go venture into Cabo. Our morning started with a dive. We dove out at 2 different places near The Arch; they were called Cortez’s Finger and Pelican Rock. The water was warmer than we are used to in San Diego. We saw lots and lots of fish, eel, starfish, and manta rays on the surface jumping out of the water!









We went on a dinner cruise Sunday evening. We actually hadn't seen The Arch yet, so I'm really glad we went on the cruise. The Arch is the end of the Baja peninsula where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Cortez. The cruise lasted about 2 and a half hours and took you down around The Arch and up the Pacific side a ways before coming back to the harbor. We met another couple from Texas, Adrian and Mary, and spent the whole time with them.

After the cruise, we went with Adrian and Mary to the Giggling Marlin and Cabo Wabo. These are 2 very popular places for tourists to visit. At the Giggling Marlin, there is a lot of crowd entertainment. Every so often, they come around with shot trays and stick a sombrero on your head and pour 2 shots down your throat. Aye Carumba!















I also felt my first earthquake in Cabo! We were in our room watching TV and the armour and everything in the room started shaking. We went out into the hall and no one seemed to have noticed. We asked 2 ladies that walked by if they felt the earthquake and they thought we were kidding. We almost thought maybe the whole thing was the result of something else until we heard later that La Paz had a 6.4 earthquake. La Paz is about an hour north of Cabo.

I'm glad we made it back home before the hurricane hit!

More pictures of Cabo here!

First Solo Dives!!

This morning Theresa and I headed to the cove in La Jolla for our first solo dives! The conditions were a little murky but we did get to see some cool animals. We saw a bunch of kelp bass, some HUGE lobsters, Garibaldi (CA state fish) and tons of other fish. We also saw some sort of a ray and a really fat seal. The coolest parts (and the reason we went) were the sharks (soupfin/tope) and the Giant Sea Bass. The sharks are freaky because the look mean and tough and just sort of cruise in and out of your line of sight. They are hard to get a close look at because the air bubbles scare them away. However, one swam within a few feet of us so we had a perfect view! We also saw a few Giant Sea Bass which look a little out of place with all of the other fish…these things are ginormous; the pictures don’t do them justice!

Giant sea bass


Garibaldi


Soupfin/Tope


photos courtesy of divebums.com

We are Certified Divers!

We finished our open water certification course yesterday. We went on a boat dive to a kelp forest off Mission Bay. It was a rough day, because I got a little sea sick. Mike took something before to prevent getting sick, but I thought I'd be ok since I usually don't have problems on boats. From now on, I'm never taking that chance again.

The pictures below show what it can look like underwater, but we had no visibility on our first dive of the day, so we didn't see very much. It was a little scary at first, because I couldn't see anything and I hate swimming in kelp normally. Our depth was about 45 feet.


So, for our certification course, we've had 3 dives of "hardly being able to see my hand in front of my face" conditions. I was starting to second guess diving. But then....

For our second dive of the day, we moved about 1/4 mile down the shoreline. Once we descended, we could actually see!! Our depth was about 60 feet on this dive and it was freezing (like 52 degrees), but this was our first dive of getting to actually see some things. It was really cool and I'm glad we finally had good visibiltiy.

First ocean dive....check!

So, we completed our first ocean dive yesterday! I didn't freak out and the visibility was horrible even. We went to La Jolla Shores and walked in through the surf. We went down and swam around with our instructor the first time for a little tour. We had to hold onto each other, because of the poor visibility. We didn't see very much. We got out and waited for a little while before going back in again to practice some skills we'd learned in the pool; like, losing our mask, running out of air, or having to make an emergency ascent.

Our next ocean dive is July 1 and we are going out on a boat for this one. We'll try to remember our camera next time, so we can get some pictures of us in our gear at least.

For now, here's a cute shot of Jazz...

Scuba Lessons

We have decided to take scuba lessons to become certified scuba divers!

We just had our second pool session tonight and it is going really well. Besides being able to breathe and swim underwater, we have to learn different techniques. For instance, we had to take off our mask while under water and just sit there for a few moments. It was a little freaky to me, because the air bubbles from my regulator felt like they wanted to go up my nose. We also had to see what it felt like to run out of air and have to grab onto our buddy's secondary air to be able to get air. I haven't completely freaked out and surfaced yet, even though I feel like I want to sometimes.

I just hope I can keep up this confidence when it comes to diving in the ocean. San Diego has colder water and less visibility than most of the tropical areas. Our first ocean dive is June 9, so that will be the moment I know if I can do this diving thing. Of course, Mike isn't nervous at all. He is one of the bravest people I know!