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| Our waiter took our anniversary photo last night after dinner. |
As we’ve mentioned in past posts, we don’t have transportation while in Placencia Belize. We made a hard decision when we moved to Laru Beya on February 5, 2013. With the cost of our rental doubling for two remaining months that we’re here and a budget staring us in the face, we opted to only rent a vehicle as needed.
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| Palm fronds we discovered on a walk yesterday. |
So far, other than the one week in early February that we buzzed around in a rented golf cart at $350 per week, we’ve managed just fine much to our mutual surprise. We thought we’d feel trapped. We don’t.
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| These are obviously fake cactus used to light the road at night. See the orange one on the left. |
Our resort has golf carts, motorbikes and cars available if we need one on a moment’s notice. Most likely, later in the month, we’ll rent a car to explore some of the surrounding villages after heading to the capital city of Belmopan where we’ll extend our visas for the final time. Its an hour and a half drive north of us.
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| Local sculpture. We often see variations of this style. |
Without a doubt, there is a huge temptation as one travels the world (from our limited experience thus far) to splurge to fuel one’s perception of what a “vacation” looks like with frequent siteseeing expeditions. Most of these outings in this remote area require guides resulting in fees upwards of $300 for the two us for a five to six hour day trip. Some are more.
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| Another lighted fake cactus next to another local sculpture. |
We’re not on vacation. We’re living in foreign lands. When we lived in Minnesota, we seldom visited any of the local “tourist” attractions after our kids grew up. Who does unless one has out of town company or on an outing with grandchildren?
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| Sculpture of cactus plant. |
When we designed our budget, a process that continued over a period of many months, we created a plan that, health providing could last us for the remainder of our lives leaving our investments and savings in tact. Should we vary from the plan, everything changes. Suddenly, we could begin depleting our resources.
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| Locally crafted painted working fountain. |
Remembering our motto, “Wafting Through Our Worldwide Travels with Ease, Joy and Simplicity” we carefully map out our finances to stay within the budget, compensating from one month to the next should we unintentionally vary as we did when making a decision to move to Laru Beya.
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| Locally painted sign advertising Sweet Mama’s Restaurant. Notice the wood French fries in the in the wood basket on the upper left side of the sign. Cute. |
We only dine out twice a week now (ordering whatever we’d like), cooking in the remainder of the time. We don’t get massages and spa treatments. I do my own manicures and pedicures and now Tom is considering having me cut his hair. Yikes. We don’t have to go that far!
We’ve learned to re-use items we may have tossed in our old lives. We hand wash our underwear, bathing suits and tee shirts. We don’t order beverages when we sit by the pool. When cooking we increase our bang for the buck by making enough to last another night, thus reducing our cost.
We don’t dine in the “extra charge” restaurants while on cruises or purchase beverage packages that can run up to $800 per person per cruise. The only beverages we purchased aboard ship are those with our dinner, one or two cocktails for Tom, iced tea for me (for which there’s no charge).
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| We had a small 3″ cactus plant like this in Minnesota in a south window. grew 1″ in 26 years. This plant is about 3-4 feet in diameter. |
If we purchased the cruise beverage packages with an average of eight cruises per year, we’d spend an extra $10,000 per year or more. If we purchased the excursions on the cruises, we’d spend another $10,000 per year. It changes everything. It takes out the “ease, joy and simplicity” we so much relish in our new way of living. We’d rather spend our money on no less than a balcony stateroom for extra space and comfort than on extra charges we don’t really need.
Is this mindfulness difficult? Do we feel deprived? Not at all. Especially when its attached to the reality that we can go on forever if our health holds up and if we so choose.
We’d rather generously tip our maid Gloria, our server, our cab driver and all the Gloria’s and Estevan’s we’ve yet to meet than take a one day outing where all the tourists rightfully go while on their much deserved once or twice a year vacation.
Living our lives on our terms. Everyday may not be an exciting adventure. It may be only a walk along the road, enjoying the local art and culture.
It truly is a splendid life.
Tom here,
In the paragraph where Jess said we may reuse things we used to throw away.
I just want to add that in our old lives we didn't toss our underwear, bathing suits, or tee shirts.