Day 1: I woke up at my sister’s house in Houston and began those last minute checks for all of my gear. We grabbed smoothies from Juiceland and headed down to Rice. I brought all of my bags from the car into ABL and grabbed our extra gear to pack. We all loaded into the Rice bus and headed to Hobby.

We met Claire’s dad, who happened to be our pilot, went through security and ate lunch (I ate at Yia Yia Mary’s). We waited in the terminal and then finally boarded! The flight wasn’t too long, especially since I slept for half of it. My first impression of Belize was that it was very similar in look and development to other Central American countries that I’ve visited, like Costa Rice. We went pretty quickly through customs, got our bags, and met our driver Edward as we loaded up into our van.  We stopped by a store to grab extra supplies and I picked up gummy bears and a towel.

We started our drive to Crystal Paradise Ecolodge. Along the way, we drove through a lot of small villages, saw a few forest fires, and talked about the trip. We drove for about 2.5 hours and finally arrived at the Lodge. We put all of our bags in our rooms and ate a great dinner.

I haven’t seen any arachnids yet but I expect to run into a few soon. We’ve been in fairly populated areas so I’m not terribly surprised that we haven’t seen any but we will probably run into some tomorrow.