Summertime:Caye Caulker (8/7/2008)

I’ve never been good at making plans. I graduated college without one, moved to New York without one and tend to travel without one. Generally the whole seat-of-my-pants thing seems to work itself out okay for me, but in 2008 when Jade and I landed in Belize without a hotel she was doubting my system.

We were in the throes of another stifling summer in New York City and Belize sounded just exotic enough to give us a reason to leave. After landing in Belize City we took a bumpy ferry ride out to Caye Caulker and began the search for a hotel. We found a place on the far side of the tiny island and set up camp.

During Jade’s brief layover in Miami, she had made the most of her time by hitting up the duty free shop for some mango vodka. We poured the vodka into cups and rooted through the mini bar adding ingredients as we found it. We ended up with a mix of vodka, coconut rum, guava nectar and ginger ale, garnished with a Twizzler and named the Panty Flasher (because the more you drink, the less you notice your skirt riding up). As night fell and the vodka disappeared, we headed out to explore the island.

We walked the long way around the soccer pitch outside our hotel and down to the water front. We found our way out onto the pier, despites Jade’s concern that one of us would “pull and Abby” and drunkenly fall to our death. Her concerns weren’t without merit, since we narrowly missing losing a camera between the slats when Jade dumped her purse out to look for snacks.
After finding it was a slow night at the local reggae club, we popped in a tiny market to buy the snacks that were missing from Jade’s purse. As she shopped the aisle for any junk food that was even slightly familiar, I drunkenly demanded matches from the cashier.

The next club featured a rickety staircase and rope swings to lounge in as we drank our beers. However, what I found most entertaining about the bar were the resident crabs that lived under the floorboards. Jade was finally forced to pull me away after I spent the better part of our time chasing them under the building, thoroughly amused by their sideways crawling.

We when finally returned to the hotel we decided it was too much effort to walk around the soccer pitch and instead opted to go through at a dead run; giggling with our shoes in our hands. We threw our shoes down on the floor of the hotel room and discovered we were once again out of snacks. Jade resorted to desperate measures and pulled some leftover Twizzler garnish from the bottom of one of our empty drink glasses. The Twizzler dissolved on contact with her tongue and exploded in a rush of red mush. We quickly realized what a bad idea eating a vodka-soaked Twizzler was.

As I heaved myslef out of bed the next morning, I found my dress lying across the lounge table; splattered with brown streaks of Belizean mud. Jade rolled over in bed, nursing a massive Twizzler hangover. My “no plan” plan had made quite an impact on her.

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