Trip to Chaa Creek Lodge in Belize - Day 1

Note - writing this with some help from my daughter.

My family and I went on a trip to Belize in early August 2017 and I am posting some notes and pictures from the trip here.

We chose Belize for a few semi - random reasons.  First, we had wanted to go to Europe but we really only could travel just the week before school started for my kids and we felt like Europe was (1) too far (2) would involve too much jet lag and (3) would involve too many Real Madrid fans.  So we started looking around closer to home.  We wanted to go out of the country (out of the USA - not just out of California, though it really is it's own country).  So - well - we looked at Mexico.  And Central America.  And we settled on Belize.

We decided to spend the whole week of our trip at one place and, since we have been going to Hawaii a bit recently, we decided we did not want to spend our time in a beach-like setting, so we looked for places in the inland rainforesty areas.  My wife spent quite a lot of time searching for possible places and she came up with some candidates and after discussions on the pluses and minuses of all the places and after also asking Twitter and friends and such we settled on Chaa Creek.  An ecolodge of sorts with a slight upscale angle.

More on the place and such later.

Right now I really want to start to get some pictures posted.  So here are some from our travel day.

SMF to Dallas to Belize.

On the plane

I did not take too many (well, more than one) pictures on the actual trip.  But suffice it to say we flew on a plane.

An interesting shirt at a shop at the airport

Waiting for our ride while all the local taxi drivers, well, tried to offer us rides in ways I found to be, well, dubious. 

The ride to Chaa Creek was about two hours long.  I took some pics along the way.  Here are some of them.  Oh - and our driver, Edward, was an FC Barcelona fan.  Yay.

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek

On the road to Chaa Creek 

On the road to Chaa Creek 

On the road to Chaa Creek 

Off to the reception building 

Off to the reception building

Off to the reception building

Off to the reception building

We settled in, got some dinner, and were very hot.  Like really very hot.  Like really really warmer than warm.  It was beautiful.  And interesting.  And hot.  Really really hot.  Or, more relevant.  It was hot and really really humid.  I mean, I grew up in the Washington DC area so I know hot and humid.  But I live in California now, where hot and humid usually do not go together.  We get hot in Davis.  Really really really hot.  But dry. Like really really dry. .