For us, this wonderful vacation will forever be linked to a house catastrophe that we experienced ten days before the start of our vacation. A pipe coming out of our hot water heater broke loose from its fitting and gushed water for as many as five hours. The attic, where the hot water heater was located, and all adjoining rooms suffered damage. Dealing with this incident stole some of our anticipation for the vacation before we left on it. On returning from our vacation, it rapidly became a background, pleasant memory, prematurely relegated to that role by the importance of focusing on house repairs. (We would still carve out time to do our diary, photo albums, and view the vacation videos which--as did our pre-vacation efforts--took more time than the vacation itself.) Costs of tearing out walls and drying out the house (to limit structural damage) and then repairing damage that was done exceeded $20,000. (That's in US dollars, not Mexican pesos.) Homeowners insurance covered these expenses. It would be almost three months before work on our house was completed.

A related but new problem occurred during our vacation. As the integrity of the house was compromised for drying purposes (walls were missing), a family of mice found an easy access to our kitchen. They ate a variety of foods from our pantry and shit and pissed throughout the kitchen. It took us a day to clean it out and a couple of days to catch the mother and her four still suckling offspring. (They were captured unhurt and released in nearby woods.)

The cost of our 15 day, three person Yucatan vacation–excluding the money we spent on gifts for ourselves, family and friends–was $2,750 (and that includes the $133 phone bill we rang up while there). That was right on our pre-trip estimate of $2,700 (which we got by projecting expenses to be $100 per day for fifteen days plus $1,200 for airfare). That's about the price tour operators give to three people for just one "all-inclusive" week (airfare, room, and most meals but no tours).

A final postscript on Hurricane Mitch. Though Mitch had little impact on us personally, its impact on the region–on Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Belize–was staggering. Mitch killed as many as 13,000 people, wounded another 12,000, destroyed the homes of over one million people, and caused $5 billion in damages to property and infrastructure. Natural disasters can cause billions of dollars in US property damages (it takes a lot of thatched roof shacks to add up to the cost of a beach front house) but the United States hasn't had a natural disaster take more than 100 lives in fifty years. In those countries, houses are not as robust, communication not as widespread, and the ability to travel considerably less than in the US. If you live in a Third World country, even if you hear about an impending natural disaster, where can you go? How can you get there? If you stay, your meager house has little chance of surviving a flood, hurricane, mudslide, earthquake, or volcano. If you survive the initial disaster, lack of shelter, clean water, sewage, food, power, or medical care may lead to your death. What a tremendous difference it makes in where one happens to be born.
 

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