Cruise 2012: in which we get rained upon

During his morning visit, Will got an inhaler from the doctor, with the same medicine they’d been putting up his nose with the nebulizer. It went with the antibiotic and steroid pills he’d been given the day before. Dr Fullerton is a cool doc. He’s from Florida and had been a doctor in both the Army and the Navy, and had been stationed in Groton and liked it in New England. When he gave Will the inhaler he told him to hide it in his pocket and not tell the nurses because we’d “already paid enough” for everything. I thought that was pretty nice of him. He showed us where he got attacked on the face by jellyfish while swimming in Cozumel the day before, preparing for an Ironman in a few weeks. He swam the actual course he’d be doing in the competition, a full one, with a 2.5 mile swim, 110 mile bike ride followed by a full marathon.

Then we took tender #18 to Belize City and walked around for exactly an hour. The first thing I saw was the world's biggest cockroach, thankfully dead.
We were going to do the chocolate factory tour but it was lame and not worth $20 a person even with free chocolate bars included. I had a chocolate shake there—it was high cacao chocolate, slightly bitter, the good stuff—and Will had an espresso, both made with local organic beans. While we were in the chocolate place there was a torrential downpour, like monsoon quality, rain solid in the sky, downpour. It made me feel a little better about missing Xunatunich since they said you can’t climb the pyramid to see into Guatemala in the rain. I really wanted to go, of course, to add another ruins site to my collect-the-whole-set, but not at my husband’s health’s expense.

The shopping village featured many, many wooden pillars carved into Mayan glyphs. I took photos of a lot of them but they were actually kind of lame. The gylphs didn’t make any sense, they were just crammed 4 or 5 to a pillar. I bought a few things and we actually were about to board the very same tender that had brought us to the village (it had made a round trip to the ship while we shopped) but it was going off empty. (more text below pics)

We were back in time for lunch, and Will felt really tired after only that little bit of slow walking. We ate at the hamburger place and I worked out in the pool and we hung out there for a little while.
At dinner, I went in alone while they went up to the steak house. The waiters kept trying to fill all 4 glasses with water. I’d say, “they aren’t coming” and hopefully they’d say “maybe they are” even though I said they went upstairs to the steak place. Then they offered apple pie a la mode for dessert. My husband loves apple pie. I got it to go for him and I went to get myself another piece of chocolate cake. And the bakery was out of chocolate cake. Evidently someone came along and bought the whole cake! They had carrot cake only, and one single chocolate chip cookie which seemed so lonely I just had to take it back to the room with me. I called room service for some hot chocolate and had my dessert in the room.
When my husband finally came in he laughed because I’d brought him dessert. All 3 of them had 14 oz individual (!?) cheesecakes for dessert (and not finished them) and apparently the cheesecake was awesome and the food was awesome and I should have gone except that I don’t care much for steak and I hate seafood and that’s all they had. He said he’d have the pie for breakfast.