Honeymoon #4 - Part 1

Jonathan and I took a 12 day trip without the girls to Honduras from 15-26 May. So far, this has been the best "sans kids" trip yet!

We left early the morning of May 15th and flew to Miami where we spent the night at the Sofitel hotel near the airport. We had a beautiful suite, enjoyed room service and a movie without any interruptions! This hotel served as the "bookends" to our trip since we were unable to fly directly to Honduras in 1 day.

Coffee at the San Diego airport while checking email/FB.
~~~
Here is our suite~room 1015 on the front end and 615 at the end. They looked the exact same and we had a view of the runways.


We had the BEST Nutella Crepes in this bed! :)

On the 16th we boarded our plane headed to Honduras. It was a mere 2 hour flight and we flew over the Florida Keys, Cuba and the "Islas de Bahia" (Bay Islands) of Honduras before landing at San Pedro Sula international airport.

You can barely see the island of Utila (touching the wing, clouds above it).


Almost there! The pilot said it was 95 degrees-yum.


Northern coast of Honduras.

We then quickly got through customs and saw a sign reading "Mr. Jonathan Kassebaum" and Lima and Brenda were waiting to take us to The Lodge at Pico Bonito. We had a 3 hour drive and wanted to stop to eat at Tio Dolmo (we didn't take any pix but I found this video on YouTube). Some friends of ours from Panama City were Honduran (well, she was) and we had dinner with her family prior to leaving Florida and they told us about this restaurant. We originally forgot the name of the restaurant, but when we told Brenda we wanted to eat at "Tio Something" she knew what we were talking about. After some delish authentic Honduran grub and a thunderstorm, we continued our drive to the rain forest.

Waiting to continue our drive after lunch...and yes I was a tad worried since it just started down pouring! For those of you in the southeast...you think Florida is hot and muggy! This place has it beat!

Our drive to the lodge was rainy so we didn't get many photos, but we did snap these on our way back to the airport at the end of our trip. We quickly noticed how prevalent Coke and Pepsi are along side the road. We learned that these companies will provide paint for people's "pulperias" (basically a convenience store) or signs for the cities, but they paint them to look like a Coke or Pepsi can.

Signs for the town of La Masica


Someone's store/home.



Signs for the town of El Boquete

Its amazing traveling outside of the US. We immediately said "wow" and realized how blessed and fortunate we are to live in America.

Honduras' economy is agricultural and the majority of what we saw were pineapples, coconuts and bananas.

Dole Pineapple field (not just grown in Hawaii).
We learned from an employee at the Lodge that workers get paid $60 a week to pull 1,250 pineapples. He did that job for about 2 years before he had had enough!

~Other things we saw while driving~

Taxi


Lots of colorful homes. Laundry is hung out to dry. We saw this in Costa Rica too.


A cart and someones home.


Women really DO do this. We saw this a few times.

A car wash.
You can see that you drive your car up onto the yellow risers and men wash your car.


Carneceria. That's meat hanging there.

The Florida friend I mentioned before who is from Honduras...her maiden name is "Handal" and her family has department stores in Honduras similar to Macy's here in the US. We saw billboards and a few of the stores on our drive. Brenda was shocked when we told her we knew that family! I guess they are a big deal down there. :)

Here is one at the mall in the town of "El Progreso".

There was an earthquake about a year ago that took out a bridge. We drove on the new one, but here are photos of the old one broken in half!


West side of the bridge.


East side of the bridge.

~Stay tuned for part 2~