The quest for sleep and a midnight adventure!

As we head in to the home stretch of this trip, I'm really struggling with two competing emotions.  

Emotion 1:  I love it here.  I love being on holidays.  I love being able to spend days at a time time with Andrew (most of the time, anyway).  I love that I haven't had a stitch of make up on or done anything with my hair in in more than 10 days.  I love that the stress of work seems a million miles away.   I love that we have the good fortune and luxury to travel the world, see new sights and learn about other cultures. 

 

Emotion 2:  I'm am tired!  I know we're on holidays but, seriously people, I'm exhausted.   Not because we've been busy on this trip.  In fact, this is the least scheduled and most low-key trip we've been on that I can recall.  We have had so much down time, in fact, that I've actually had the audacity to be bored a time a two.  I'm tired because we haven't had a full-nights sleep since we got here! 

Let's recap, shall we? 

• Nights one, two, three and nine - torrential rain in the middle of the night necessitating leaping from bed to close windows
• Nights two through nine - sand flea bites itching, preventing any type of meaningful rest
• Nights one through nine -  a bed custom-made for Fred Flintstone with matching pillows, each boating approximately one inch of loft 
• Night seven - midnight sheet changing episode
• Also night seven - Saturday night parties about the neighborhood
• Night nine - large animal having a take-away meal in our yard (more on that to follow)
• Morning two - mosquito fogging truck pulls through town at 5 am
• Mornings two through seven, and ten - construction workers building a house next door starting at 6:30 am
• Mornings one through ten - aviary in the tree 3 feet from our window opens for business about 5:15

Now, for those of you who know me well, you probably already know a couple of things about me.  First, I am a terrible sleeper even under the most ideal conditions.  Second, my ideal conditions are pretty much limited to my own bedroom.  Simply put, I love my bed.  We have a king-sized sleep number bed and my sleep number is barely out of the single digits.  I have heaps of lovely down pillows and 1200 thread count sheets.  I have a fan that cools me off when I am too hot, and a heating pad that warms me up when I am too cold.  Yet even in this carefully controlled environment, I don't sleep.  So, re-read the list above and imagine, if you will, what's happening here.  

Ok, so enough whining about my lack of sleep - it's annoying, I know.  Even to me.  Let me tell you about the large animal...

We went to bed about 9 pm last night.  Andrew having had a giant nap, was playing on his iPad and I was up and down working on various solutions to my itching.  The last time I looked at the clock it was about 11 pm.  Around midnight, I feel Andrew leap out of the bed.  I open my eyes to see him moving quickly back and forth between two windows in the bedroom.  

Me:  What's going on? 

Andrew:  The yard light just came on and someone went up the steps next door.  

A few things you should know about the house next door that will add interest to this story:  the owners are not currently here, so it's vacant; it was just broken in to about a week ago and there is plywood where the door used to be; it's right next door to "the crack house" Kim warned us to be very afraid of; and there is approximately 15 feet between it and the house we're staying in. 

Instantly awake, I join Andrew at the window and we try to sleuth out what's going on just a few feet away.  As luck would have it, we can't see a damn thing, because the house is vacant.  This means no porch lights are lighting up that area.  We do, however, hear some scuffling sounds, a bottle lightly hitting the wooden deck and general moving about noises.  It only takes a few minutes for us to hear what we think are the sounds of the husk of a coconut being ripped off.  Based on this, we're no longer concerned it's a deranged crack fiend.  We're now sure it's some sort of animal.  Based on the amount of noise it's making and the fact that it set off the motion-sensored yard light, we also deduce must be a pretty good size.  

What big animal rips open coconuts, we wonder aloud?   Are there monkeys on Caye Caulker?  I know there are Howler monkeys on the mainland, but we've never heard one on Caye Caulker (and we would have - they are loud!).  We start running through the other animals we saw at the zoo in February.  Panther?  Probably (hopefully!) not eating a coconut.  A tapir?  No, they are like small cows and have hooves, which would have sounded very different on the stairs.  That raccoon-monkey thing we can't remember the name of?  Possibly!  

We spend the better part of 30 minutes peering wide-eyed in to the dark and discussing the various things it could be.  We eventually hear it pad down the steps and vanish in to the night, unseen.  We are now completely keyed up, so we are still mostly awake when the torrential downpour starts at 2:15.  We jump up to close windows and opt to fore go saving the swimming suits & towels we hung up outside to dry.

By 5 am, we're awake (thanks birds) and anxious to see what clues were left by the night beast.  We run outside to find this...

Wow, detectives we are not - we were way off.  The "ripping" noise that sounded to us like coconut husk was actually the shredding of a plastic bag full of trash.  There is a wine bottle, so we were right on that.  High-five!  There's also lobster tails and lots of foil.  What we still don't know, however, is what type of rare and exotic creature might do such a thing.  Imagine our disappointment to learn from Kim that it's the neighbor's dog, and that this is not a rare thing.  In fact, it happens all the time.  What a let down and waste of precious sleep time!  Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.