Jess and Stacey’s Travels

After one month in our tropical bubble on Utila, we’re heading to the less obvious, non-tropical destinations of Missouri and Connecticut.  We’ll be doing homestays there as well, improving our English with family and friends :.  We will be back in Central America in August. 

Utila was good to us.  Stacey completed her Rescue Diver Course and Jess caught up on movies and books.  The people at the dive shop were really great.  We are planning on returning at some point once we come back from the states.

We’ll continue the blog in August unless there is great reader demand to hear more about Missouri and Connecticut.

We’re still here in Utila, although our passports say that we went to Belize.  We think we had a great time there.  We overstayed our 3 month welcome and had to pay a bit more to the immigration officer here on the island to get a new stamp giving us another 3 months.  The other option was to actually have to go to Belize, Mexico or Costa Rica, all of which would have cost us much more, as the immigration officer was keenly aware when he set his price.

Stacey is continuing to take dive classes, now doing the rescue diver class.  Jess has gone through much of the alphabet of Sue Grafton’s murder mysteries.  He’s on S is for Silence now.  The Funkytown video rental/library/book exchange is next door.  We’re both still enjoying our room at Rubi’s.  There have been some amazing lightening storms out over the water that we watch from our room.  Always a party with us.

For those of you (i.e. Betsy) who requested more information about the food, we swing between two diets.  Diet A, we’ll call the “college dorm diet” involves us eating Cup of Noodles, Mac and Cheese, Ramen, hot dogs, microwave popcorn, cans of peas and candy bars in our room.  Diet B, “vacation diet”, the less frequent scenario, is us eating out – pasta, sometimes fish filets, salad, pizza, nachos, burgers, etc.  Eating out isn’t that expensive, but shockingly we still tend to be frugal people, even in a 3rd world nation.  Utila isn’t quite reknown for it’s food.  It’s cheap and filling, perfect for the dive crowd.  We frequent the same places when we do eat out.  Jitters for coffee and muffins run by a retired American lawyer from Alaska.  Went to UW law.  Big Mammas for breakfast sometimes.  Bundu Cafe, run by a Canadian couple, for BBQ chicken, taco salad or their special of the day.  Bundu shows a movie during dinner.  The bakery for whatever they happened to make that day.  The dive shop bar for lunch specials and milkshakes.  The cinema snack shop (next door to us) for milkshakes.  We used to eat a place called Munchies but learned that they serve conch which is a bad thing to take out of the ocean here so some of the dive shops are boycotting the restaurant. 

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we met a family living on a boat at Finca Tatin on Rio Dulce in Guatemala.  As chance would have it, they are now moored out in the bay, within swimming distance of us.  Since Utila is essentially a one seahorse town, we ran into them the other night.  After nine years of being in Guatemala they decided to explore a bit of Honduras.  The family that runs Finca Tatin is also coming this week for vacation.  Guess this means another Uno rematch with 6 year old smack talking.