It was quite lovely, but I can see why there was so much criticism about the 1996 Altanta Olympics for being so horrifically commercial. Everything in the park — and I mean everything — had a corporate sponsor on it: bricks, plaques, buildings, statues, etc. I can’t imagine what it would have been like when lined with 100s of booths representing a patheon of corporations preying on the American consumer culture.
First thing we learned was to not trust state tourism department’s web sites. It makes sense with hindsight, but both Virginia and Maryland seem to have incentive to be less then honest about the status of the foliage in their respective purviews. In their “foliage reports,” they used words like “spectacular” and “peak” that roughly translated to “intermittent” and “you should have visited two weeks ago.”
The only people who seemed to have a clue about what was going on was The Weather Channel, which has a forecast map showing the state of the foliage on the ground. This turned out to be the most correct, largely because it said that vast majority of the country is, in fact, “past peak”.
In search of what was left, we drove out to Elk Neck State Park in Maryland, which is situated right on the northern tip of the Chesapeake Bay. The drive in had some widespread (but muted) foliage, but there wasn’t anything — and I mean anything — once we go into the park itself. From there, we headed 20 miles west of Baltimore to Morgan Run Natural Environment Area. While the drive in wasn’t as pretty as in the far northeast of the state, the hiking was great.
From all reports, this just isn’t going to be a good year for foliage. I found a great write-up on what makes for good foliage, and we just didn’t have the wet growing season and dry, sunny fall needed for anything other than muted, muddy leaf peeping.
Now, there are always people who *say* they want to see pictures from the honeymoon, but aren’t prepared for the full 526 photo onslaught. For those, we have prepared something special: the 72 picture abridged Belize.
If you are looking for the full annotated story (the hard core wedding enthusiasts, I presume) check out our more expansive “honeymoon” posts for a walk through our 10 amazing days in Belize.
After driving out towards the A.T.M., we parked the van and hiked 45 minutes to the mouth of the caves. Once there, we hopped into the river flowing out of the cave, and swam inside. After about 100 yards, the water was shallow enough to stand up. After hiking through the water for about half a kilometer, we climbed out of the river and spent an hour walking through the formations which 2,000 years earlier were a Mayan burial ground.
The whole day was spectacular, not just the journey, but the formations and especially the Mayan artifacts left untouched for over two millennia.
We got up early and spent the morning birding with a local naturalist. After breakfast, we went mountain biking through the nature reserve next door. After lunch, we got a tour of the reserve’s butterfly farm. Finally, after dinner, we hiked the resort’s River Trail (which, up to this point, had been closed due to high water levels caused by the wet season).
One monument here records a military victory over the army of Tikal — a larger Mayan city across the border in Guatemala — in 562CE, where Caracol’s Lord Water is shown to have captured and sacrificed Tikal’s Double Bird.
Part of the excitement was having AK-47 toting members of the Belize Defence Forces escort us from the Mountain Pine Ridge ranger station to the ruins. Apparently, about two years ago, a group of Guatemalan bandits (angry about the aforementioned defeat of Tikal, I’m sure…) crossed the border and held up a couple of tour buses. While the bandits were caught long ago (and presumably taken out back and shot) the Belizean authorities aren’t taking any chances with their tourist revenue.
The ruins themselves were just amazing, and we were two of 30 people in the park that day, so had the place largely to ourselves. Simply amazing.
Once in Chaa Creek, we spent the afternoon walking around the grounds of The Lodge at Chaa Creek which is where we will be spending the last half of our honeymoon.
back at the turtle inn, after making our way through the vast majority of the happy hour special list, we finally asked the bartender what the locals drink when they don’t want bad fruity resort drinks.
he introduced us to the rum and coke, with belize’s own one barrel rum.
the rum is made with sugar cane, which gives it a bit of a vanilla taste — which makes it a lot less like drinking alcohol, and a lot more like drinking vanilla cokes.
mmmmm.
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