The parade was advertised to start at 5 pm, so we hustled to get everything together to ride our bikes into town after Paisley's afternoon playtime on the beach. Barry wanted to try riding our bikes instead of taking the water taxi back, as we've always done when we've been in town after dark in the past. We would take our headlamps for riding back in the dark. When we tried them out, mine wouldn't light; it appeared the batteries were dead. When I removed them, I noticed some corrosion on one of them; must have been the salty, humid air here. I should never have left the batteries in the headlamp when I wasn't using it -- my bad. So we'd need to make an extra stop in town for more Triple-A batteries before heading home.
We had a nice ride into town along the beach and bought a four-pack of batteries at Caye Supplies, a fine variety store in town. After many purchases there when we first moved here and needed quite a few basic household items, we heard from our friend Robert recently that we could be getting a 5% local discount, so starting today, I asked for it (we'd bought a few items there earlier today on our grocery ride also) and got it. Sure do wish I'd known this before as we could have saved a little money early on. Better late than never, I guess!
After picking up the batteries, we started cruising around town looking for the parade. No sign of it. However, parades and other events are known to start a bit behind schedule in Belize, so we didn't worry. Barry snapped a few photos of holiday lights in town while we waited around.
We were disappointed, but didn't want to wait around too much longer since we figured we might never find it, and we were getting hungry, so we decided to head back. Part of the purpose of the trip was to test out our headlamps and riding home from town after dark, so we could at least accomplish that.
It was plenty light in town with street lights, so we didn't need the headlamps until we crossed the bridge. At that point, we put on our headlamps to continue the rest of the journey back to our condo, another two miles or so.
The ride back now that I could see was actually a lot of fun. I rode behind Barry so had the benefit of his light as well. It was definitely a little more challenging than riding in the light of day, but we had no problems and made it back just fine. We did hear a lot of barking dogs along the way, so I guess dogs don't like small moving lights in the night. Fortunately, they were all behind fences.
I'll be interested to find out if this parade actually did occur and where we went wrong! Maybe next year....