I think I suck at taking vacations. Since there seems to be Internet everywhere, it is hard for me to get away from work. But, I have to say that this trip has been relaxing, and I have managed to spend five days in a row without wearing shoes or a watch.

I’m at a dive resort called CoCo View in the Bay Islands of Honduras. Last year Andrea got certified in scuba and she’s been bitten hard by the diving bug. A couple of month ago she called me, and the conversation went something like this:

A: Hey, the Scuba Club is doing a trip to Honduras. Can I go?

T: Sure, I’ll look after the farm. When is it?

A: The week after Easter.

T: Oh, the week of our anniversary.

A: (silence)

T: The week of our 20th anniversary.

A: (more silence)

Anyway, I looked at the website and decided that, although it’s kind of pricey if you aren’t diving, it looked fun so I would go, too. I used some miles to book our flights and we made plans to go to Honduras. Plus, Honduras would be the 34th country I’ve visited.

CoCo View is on Roatán Island, and American has a direct flight from Miami. This avoids going to the mainland. Honduras has the highest murder rate of any country (something like 159 per 100,000 in population in one city) but the tourist-friendly Bay Islands are pretty safe. We got up at some ungodly hour, like 3am, in order to fly first from Raleigh to Miami, and then on to Roatán, arriving a little after 1pm local time (Roatán is in Central Time but they don’t follow Daylight Saving Time so it was a two hour difference).

We were met at the airport by the resort staff and then we boarded the bus to the resort. There is only one main road on the island (it is 37 miles long but only 5 miles wide at the widest point) and CoCo View is located in about the middle on the south side. From the road you take a very short boat ride to the resort itself.

What I saw of Honduras from the bus was similar to other, similar places I’ve been. There are a few stores and restaurants clustered along the road but mainly you see some shacks built up on stilts where most of the people live. It is a very poor country. But the resort itself was a bit of an oasis from that.

Andrea and I joined seven other people from Raleigh, which was cool, since we ended up with our own table and a group of people to meet with for meals. The main organizer, Sid, and his partner Linda got delayed through Atlanta and didn’t arrive until Sunday, so Saturday we just checked in to our room and went snorkeling around the protected cove known as The Front Porch.

Our room was upstairs in the building right next to the main Club House. It was nothing fancy – we had much nicer quarters in Fiji, Vanuatu and Thailand – but for a dive resort it was fine. The typical dive day is as follows: wake up, eat breakfast, go out on the boat, dive, have a surface break on the boat while it comes back to the resort, get dropped off some distance away and you swim back in. Eat lunch, repeat the morning. Eat supper, and if you want, shore dive at night.

So – not much need for a nice room.

The snorkeling was fun. The coral aren’t as nice as what we saw in the Pacific, but the fish were pretty cool. There seemed to be a greater variety of them. Saturday night we had dinner with the rest of the gang, and then we went to bed and slept for over 11 hours.

On the way to the room we saw a swarm of “hummingbats”. The resort puts out a number of hummingbird feeders, but in the evening they are taken over by bats. Couldn’t get a decent picture or movie of them, however.

The rest of the gang, by the way, consisted of Jen and Shelia (two young ladies who have been diving together for the last year or so), Nicki (a dive instructor), Jeri (who started out with Andrea but has gone even more scuba crazy and is nearing her 100th dive), and Greg (who has to use a motorized chair to get around but love to dive) in addition to Sid and Linda, and Andrea and me.

It was nice to have Jen and Shelia around, since the average age of the sixty or so divers this week is north of 50 years. There were about five or so teenagers running around, but mainly it was older folks.

On Monday afternoon, our anniversary, Sid sent up a bottle of wine and at dinner they gave us a card and a heart-shaped cake. It was nice.

I don’t dive, so my days were a little different. I’d eat breakfast and then find a place to sit and read. I read an 800+ novel called [Existence][5] which I liked a lot, and I plan to talk about it on my work blog. That took up most of the week. I haven’t been in the water again (well, except to retrieve Greg’s Down Under license plate that blew off one day) mainly due to high wind. The seas have been pretty choppy. As much as I dislike boats, hearing Jeri say things like “yes, it is possible to throw up in your regulator with no long term ill effects” has not motivated me to get out there. Hers is not the only story I’ve heard about “chumming the water” this week, although things are looking pretty nice today.

If things go well, Andrea should hit here 50th dive today, which is cool. I’m still on the fence as to if I want to get certified. Things back home are so busy that I won’t have to decide too soon.