Central America Summary & Buying Plane Tickets

Well, despite the food poisoning, I must say we had an interesting trip. We did a lot of the neat adventure stuff that Central America has to offer. We saw mayan ruins, (including the spectacular Tikal in Guatamala,) went cave-tubing, swam in rivers, lakes & the ocean, went on a night tour at the zoo, went snorkeling (Paul scuba-dived), zip-lining, bike-riding, hiking, & horsebackriding on our trip. The kids enjoyed the swimming holes we found. They loved jumping off a rope swing into a river and jumping off a small rope bridge into a river. I should post a video of that. I'm sure you can do it somewhere in the Midwest in the States, but it's not something we can do in LA, so that was a neat experience for them.

We found Belize to be less developed than Costa Rica which we were surprised at. But since it is a former British colony, they spoke English there and it seemed more "civilized" and perhaps safe I guess, than Guatamala & Nicaragua. We passed a lot of people living in shacks along the highway, with no running water or electricity in the latter 2 countries. I would say Guatamala & Nicaragua were 3rd world countries, not really even "developing countries". I'm not sure how much the kids picked up on that. Charlie's first day comment was, "They don't even have McDonald's or Burger King here!" Hmmmm....is that all you noticed?! But we did stay in a couple hotels that did not have hot water (they were considered mid-range hotels), so the kids did get a little taste of that.

Other than that, today we pulled the trigger and bought our (non-refundable) one-way tickets for the first leg of our trip. We will leave LAX on July 5 (our 13th wedding anniversary) and fly to Nadi, Fiji for 12 days. Then we fly to the south island of New Zealand for 10 days and then we fly to Melbourne where we will stay with some friends.