Four days and a bit since we got here: 3 visits to Tutti Fruitti, 3 visits to Above Grounds Café, 3 walks about town, 3 times in swimming, 1 visit to Tranquilo for sunset drinks, 2 Happy Hours with friends. The good life in Placencia!

A combination of weather and internet requirements has kept us in Placencia this week, but it is a happy little base to hang out in. Boats come and go around us – some out for the day and back in the evening, some gone for a few days at a time. The Moorings base for rental boats is around the corner and we’ve seen a lot of catamarans with happy vacationers.

Placencia is a tourist town with vacation rental cottages as well as being a base for cruising sailboats and charter boats, so during our walks around town we meet a wide variety of folks. Bars and restaurants line the main street as well as the famous “mile long sidewalk” that follows the beach on the north side. Craft and gift stores are more plentiful than the tiendas we were used to seeing in Guatemala. There are three or four grocery stores, a handful of produce stands and some great little street food stands with burritos, gumbo, and tamales.

From the main harbour where we are anchored, we take the dinghy across to Yoli’s bar where they very kindly welcome boaters to tie their dinghies. After greeting the always-present drinkers at the bar, we wander along a gorgeous little path lined with exotic flowers to the dirt road into town. Houses are mostly on stilts here – and I’m not sure if it is for flooding reasons or insect control or better airflow, or to give a place for clotheslines when it rains. Derelict cars rest beside some of them, while others have immaculate yards – and mostly everyone has a clothesline.

We smiled to see the speed bumps that we remembered from when we were here two years ago – thick lengths of rope lying across the road that is already so potholed one can’t pick up any speed anyway. From the corner by Ther’s laundry service, we can walk straight toward one corner of the ball field, across a vacant lot to the paved road that leads to the Phone store and the M&M hardware store and the Hokey Pokey water taxi service. A couple of Chinese owned grocery stores with a good selection of products can be found up here – and the word is that the farther we go from the centre of town, the better the prices are.

If we turn right from Ther’s corner, we pass a lovely little school with brightly painted class “cottages” behind the picket fence, walk along the soccer field and out to the main street right across from the Tutti Fruitti store. Everyone raves about this place – with a dozen selections of ice cream and gelato to choose from, air conditioning and a handful of stools inside, and lounge chairs on the porch. For $5 B ($2.50 US) we can enjoy two scoops of deliciousness in a cone – things like hazelnut, milk chocolate, lime, coconut, passion fruit, caramel, strawberry (that tastes like the strawberries just came in from the berry patch) pistachio, dark chocolate and more and more and more. They also sell little cups but I have this thing about plastic so Jim and I always choose cones – and despite the heat, we don’t have much trouble with drips and melts.

My favourite produce stand is right across the street – where we can buy not only produce, but frozen meats, yogurt, eggs, bread, the tasty plantain chips that we love as snacks. The variety is as wide as in Rio Dulce but the prices are almost double – still less than in Nova Scotia though. I paid $63.50 B (about $32US) for 3 small bags of plantain chips and a small bag of tostadas, 1 pineapple, 1 head of broccoli, 1 bunch of celery, 2 apples, 4 potatoes, 2 - 500 ml containers of yogurt and 250 ml of cream. (It may be the non-produce things that pumped up the price.) There is more variety of wine here but it is $30B per bottle so we are still drinking our boxed “Clos to wine.”

Above Grounds Café is a delight. With porches on both street side and garden side as well as a few tables inside, a book exchange, friendly staff and Wi-Fi, it is a gathering place for travellers and residents. As the name indicates, it is all up the stairs – shaded by an enormous tree – and feels like a tree house. The coffee is fair trade Guatemalan – sometimes from De La Gente (Jim and I took a tour with them last year, walking up to the small plots of coffee trees not far from Antigua) and sometimes from another group of family farmers. We met a Canadian woman who moved here 10 years ago after she and her husband watched too many of their co-workers die too young, and sailors from all over the world, and visitors who are just in for a week, and folks who drove south once upon a time and stayed.

In the two years since we were last here, there have been some more developments in town. The houses along the sidewalk are spruced up; I think there are more restaurants; the municipal pier where small cruise ships come once in a while and where the fishing boats tie up is much improved. We haven’t seen any cruise boats come in since we’ve been here and we left the dinghy there only once while we dropped some trash in the bins. The sign said dinghy tie up costs $5 per day but no one was there to collect. It seems somehow more transient boater friendly over at Yoli’s where we buy a soda or a beer and once in a while have a meal.

One lovely new place is Tranquilo – on little Placencia Cay on the east side of the anchorage. It was just an empty space in 2013, but is now a delightful spot to have a sunset drink or dinner. Signs at the municipal dock give a phone number to call for launch service to and from the cay, but we are anchored so close that we just dinghied on over. And to our great delight, we discovered that at least on that night, Madcap was in direct line of the sinking sun. Picture perfect! Judging by the number of people aiming their cameras in that direction, there must be dozens of pictures of Madcap - silhouetted against the sunset - floating around the world of social media photos.

The cold front that has brought changing winds and the occasional squall will pass by Saturday and we will be ready to go off to explore some cays and do some snorkeling. It blew us around a bit last evening – a brief soaking rain and some showers, and a 180-degree change in wind direction but we stayed nicely in place. Interestingly, one boat dragged late afternoon as the wind started, and another dragged this morning in mild gusts, but no damage was done in either case. It is just enough of a reminder to never take our tenuous connection to security for granted.

In the meantime, we watch the Canadian weather reports and feel both concern about family and friends coping with all that snow and cold, and gratitude that we are here instead. Keep warm and safe up there!