Wednesday: Departure Day

Today was a long day of many parts.

It started with being picked up at 06.45 as, notwithstanding the fact that our flight was not until 2.30pm, Barney had to be at the cargo terminal by 08.00.  Dropping him off was one of the few times we’ve felt emotional.  The last we saw him, his crate was being strapped onto a pallet with ropes.  You’d think we were trying to transport a tiger……his flight went to El Salvador before he finally reached his transit point in Miami. 

We then had a few hours to kill so checked in our luggage and went to see Caroline and Spud, who live up at the British army base.  That’s where we said goodbye to my driver, Humberto.  That was hard, particularly as he started crying, which set us off a bit.

After tea and cake, Caroline dropped us of at the Belikin Brewery where we met my colleagues, Ashanti, Rhonda and Mel, who had driven up from Belmopan, to see us off.  We had lunch, some final good laughs, and they then took us to the airport.  There were lots of tears from Rhonda, our junior housekeeper, who is particularly fond of K (as K is of her).

Our final journey out of Belize took us via Houston where immigration, seen here, was absolute chaos.  Out of 48 desks only three were open and scores of people were missing their connections, so tempers were high.  It took us three hours to get through and we made our next flight by the skin of our teeth, but only because we ran and used every queue-hopping technique known to humankind.