Honduras report: Wedding

As I mentioned in passing, I went to Honduras to attend a wedding! It was my first real tropical vacation ever and I highly recommend them.

Location of the Friday-afternoon beach wedding.

We all went to the island Roatan, 30 miles north of mainland Honduras. It's super easy to access - there are flights from Houston several days per week. The wedding party was the perfect size: the 28 or so of us fully booked the resort, Barefoot Cay.

I think all of us enjoyed the fact that we were all somehow associated with the bride & groom, and we easily fell into conversation at meals or in the pool; no one felt like a stranger for long!

The staff at the resort were super nice and they added all sorts of personal touches, from the couples' initials in the salsa (which no one wanted to disturb!) to cute little towel decorations in our lodgings.

Possibly best of all, I went scuba diving. Repeatedly. You may recall that I found it stressful (to say the least) when I was learning, but I am SO glad I put in the time and effort.

This is "my" boat - I went out three times while staying at Barefoot Cay, and was the only paying guest each time. If you look closely you can see that the seats on the boat are designed to hold many air tanks, so they could take out an awful lot of people if they wanted! My dive master (Delphine, who was awesome) said the policy at Barefoot Divers is that they take a maximum of 8 people at a time - so I was so lucky to be the only one going out. Delphine was especially helpful in giving me quick lessons in how to control my buoyancy better. It's really really interesting to spot something ahead & below, and to navigate down and over it just by exhaling and exhaling some more, lessening the volume of air in your lungs, and sinking accordingly. Scuba diving really is like flying, but it's a bit trippy if you think about it too hard (60 feet below the surface ... breathing through a piece of plastic hosing...yikes!).

All in all I went on seven dives when I was on my trip: it is a world of difference to dive off the back of a boat in warm waters. I still wore a wetsuit, but it was only 3mm and was shorts & shortsleeves, with no (claustrophobia-inducing) hood required. Plus stepping (or, later, falling backward) off a boat into the water made me feel like a rock star!

Feeling like an old, old dog

Did I mention I'm taking scuba classes? Wow, is it hard to learn a new physical activity.

I'm not a real fan of learning stuff in general, believe it or not - not if it's hard for me to learn. Bring on the knitting, the jamming, the canning, the baking - those things all make sense (even if I can't yet properly caramelize sugar after all of four or five attempts). It's not that I'm totally out of learning-practice: I have a ridiculously hard job and even after almost five years I run into a wall every single day. You'd think I'd be more graceful about it by now, but most days I have a silent hissy fit ("This is hard, it's stupid, I don't understand, can't someone else do it?!") before I remember that everyone on my team is overworked, and that I'm the boss and therefore should do the hard stuff. (Maybe I need to get over that last bit.)

I do physical stuff too: biking, hiking, camping - admittedly in small doses. There's a lot of silent freaking out on those events, though, and a lot of self-doubt. But at least I have a lot of miles under my belt and know I CAN do it, even if it's hard and I'm not loving it.

Well, scuba is hard. I feel UN-graceful UN-comfortable and UN-adept. I am clumsy and disoriented and a little scared the whole time. When I talk over my lessons with friends I see I am learning and have learned a lot, but nothing about it feels easy or natural or smart. I can never find all the stupid hoses, the dumb buttons don't depress like they ought, the darn vest WILL inflate if I  hit the inflate button, even if I meant to hit the DEflate button.

Is it the hardest thing I've done? I don't know - it's for sure the most complicated, given how much you have to put together pretty much all at once. I've done things that are harder in different ways, sure, but this is very very very not-easy.

I will hang in through my course and hope that when I get to do real diving in real water with real scenery that my pity party will be firmly behind me. As ever, stay tuned!