School Days Revisited On the way to Mayan ruins at Lamanai, Belize

    For most of our school days we rode big lumbering yellow school buses to big lumbering schoolhouses. We walked to a designated bus stop and waited, in all weather, for a driver to swing open narrow doors, and then saw faces of other kids who were just as thrilled as we were to go to school, take notes, write papers, give oral book reports, and deal with cretins. This tour to Lamanai, I get to visit school days again. Our bus isn’t yellow but it is the same Bluebird series that we rode in with Puritan seats, windows that move up and down on metal tracks, an emergency exit in the back that meant sure death if you were caught opening it by a bus driver who meant business and had power to make you walk to school instead of ride. This bus has religious modifications but the driver is attentive and we drive north from Belize City on a roadway that is part of the Pan American Highway. On this bus ride I don’t have Rasta music or Reggae or salsa or even Garifuna drums as traveling music. There is no radio. Wind coming through open windows cools us on a sunny morning. Field trips were always the funnest part of school, but we didn’t have many. School was never as fun as it should have been and riding that bus was like a prisoner going to the electric chair.