UnBELIZEable!!!

We're back from Belize and as the locals would say, it was unBELIZEable! We went for Cory's parents 30th anniversary. We had so much fun relaxing by the pool, snorkeling, hiking, and eating! We stayed at a private villa, Casa Torgtuga. You can check out the link for more info, but it was so great having our own place. We even had our own cook, Maria, who made the best food I've ever had in my life. Way better than any food you can get at a restaurant. She was amazing at recycling leftovers from dinner into something totally different and yummy for lunch the next day also. She went to the market every day so all of the food was totally fresh and a lot of it was local. There were fruit trees everywhere. We had a bunch of coconut palms on the property and it was so fun to pick them and eat them. The second day we were there we went on a snorkeling excursion and told our guide that it had taken us 45 minutes to get into it. He laughed and told us "All you have to do it find a sharp rock. Hit it on the end- bot, bot, bot, turn it over, bot bot bot n' bussit." That's all. We tried that and it still took like 20 minutes or 30 minutes, but it was funny. Maria made us a coconut cream pie with the fresh coconuts that we got. We did all of our excursion with Suya Tours. We swam with manitees (they are very endangered and Belize is the only place in the world where you can swim with them in the wild). We snorkeled the reef (the 2nd largest reef in the world) and saw 3 huge moray eels, nurse sharks, turtles, all of the normal reef fish, an arrowhead crab, etc. And we hiked to Mayan Ruins. The Mayan Ruins were awesome, but it was super long trip to get to them (it took about 5 hrs via 2 boats and a bus). We'll probably never have a chance to do that again so it was worth it. On the way up the river our guide was pointing out wildlife to us and at one point he pulled the boat over to the edge of the river and a spider monkey hopped out of the tree into our boat. They gave us some banana peices to feed to it. It was crazy! We also saw howler monkeys in the trees at the Mayan Ruins site. At the site we saw 3 temples, a residential area and a ball court. The tallest temple was about 112 feet tall and we were able to climb all the way to the top. It was very steep and a couple of people had panic attacks on the way up. Our guide said that I am the only pregnant lady he's seen climb to the top in the 8 years he's been doing this.
Cory loves snorkeling and tried so hard to get someone to go night snorkeling with him off of our dock. Finally his brother Jordan gave in and they were only out for like 10 minutes when Cory got stung on the lip by a jelly fish (or something, we don't actually know what it was). How soon he is to forget that if there is the slightest possibility of getting bitten, stung, sprayed, etc, it will happen to him. In the Turks when the boys all went night diving the same thing happened but he got tons of little bites from some sort of fish or something. He was also the only one who got sand mites. This trip we were all sitting around one night on the veranda and Cory got like 7 mosquito bites on his feet and no one else got any. He has bad luck like that.
When we weren't doing excursions we hung out at the villa or went into San Pedro to shop and hang out. The main forms of transportation there are bikes and golf carts. There were taxi vans also, so driving got a little crazy. There were no traffic signs or designated parking places or anything but the boys did a good job of getting around. Phoenix stayed with my parents and it was so nice to have a break for our parenting responsibilities but we were so happy to see him again on Sunday. He is almost walking and says "dad" now. How cute is that?
I tried to make a slideshow of all the trip pictures but for some reason they wouldn't upload so here are a few, and I will keep posting more as I have time.

The entry way to the villa

Looking out onto the pool and beach from our room

Inside our room

The back of the villa