Airplane Tickets
We flew into Roatan. Continental has one flight each on Saturday and Sunday out of Houston, and it only takes 2.5 hours. We paid $550 per round trip ticket with at least 4 months advance purchase. Compare THAT with any other flight to any other Caribbean island.
We opted to leave on a Sunday, spend 1 week on Roatan, 1 week on the mainland, then return on a Saturday. I don't know about you, but I think it's nice to have a decompression day (Sunday) before you return to work.
Hotel Reservations
We made sure we had resort reservations for all but the last day of the trip. We wanted to make sure that we stayed in a room with its own bathroom and not in any shared housing. Not good if someone is sick, especially a 4-year old.
DicaPac Underwater Camera Housing
My wife picked up a DicaPac underwater digital camera case. These things are essentially see-through dry bags, and they are an order of magnitude cheaper than the solid cases you can buy. It worked pretty well - we used it mostly to take underwater movies with our Canon Powershot. When was the last time you used your digital camera to take an underwater movie? Get one!
Digital Camera Memory
We made sure we had a ton of memory. 8GB for the little PowerShot using 4 separate 2GB SD Cards. This gave us 16 minutes of video every time we sealed it in the DicaPac.
I brought 16GB of CF card memory for my 8MPixel Canon 20D. I started out in jpeg mode, but realized that I wasn't going to ever come close to filling the cards, so I switched to RAW mode after 3 days which gave me a lot more latitude in post-processing.
With all of this memory, we didn't need to bring a laptop. That was a nice thing to be able to leave behind.
Insect Repellant
We brought some deet from home. We went through it all. I don't know if it helped, because I still got eaten alive. 2 weeks after our return, I still itch.
Drugs
We got anti-malarial medicine and a prophylactic antibiotic just in case someone got really sick. Both were under prescription.
Also, we always bring ibuprofin, immodium, and drixoral on any trip. These 3 drugs take care of almost everything. We brought Airborne this time, too. Let me tell you - that stuff works. Nobody got sick on the trip.
