Welcome back to the second half of my spring break cruising recap. When I last left you, my family and I had just survived cave tubing in Belize.

We stopped to have lunch at a Belizian diner smack dab in the middle of the jungle, and incredibly, there sat fellow Laurelites Mary Lindstrom and her two children, Anna and Alex. As we talked to them, I was going on and on about what a small world this is, and what an amazing coincidence that we would run into them in the middle of a Central American jungle when my wife, Carolyn, said, “Hey Nimwad, the Lindstroms have been on our cruise the entire time, our kids have been hanging out with Alex and Anna every night, and worst of all, we just got done cave tubing with them.” Talk about being left red-faced.

It was soon after being dressed down by my overly contentious wife that we all heard an unbelievably loud roar coming from some place nearby in the jungle. At first, we thought it was a jaguar, so I quickly hid behind my youngest daughter. Soon, the jungle was filled with ear splitting bellowing like no other sound I had ever heard before.

It only took a few seconds before I spotted people pointing up to the treetops and the source of the noise. Two howler monkeys were kibitzing about, making an ungodly racket. I am not well versed in howler monkey speak, but I’m pretty sure they were saying, “Did you hear that guy down there make a jackass out of himself in front of his wife and kids?”

By now, quite a large crowd of unusually moist tourists had gathered under the tree to view the obnoxiously loud primates. It was when I saw one of the apes reach his arm back that I panicked. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “EVERYONE DUCK AND COVER. HE’S ABOUT TO FLING POO.” Mass hysteria ensued as people dove for cover behind bushes and other jungle fauna. You can just imagine the dirty looks I received when the darn monkey simply grabbed a handful of leaves and started eating.

My family and I quickly hightailed it out of there and headed for our next Belizian jungle adventure, “aerial trekking.” I had no clue what “aerial trekking” entailed. However, having experienced it first hand, I can tell you that if you’re a male, as I claim to be, I would not recommend it.

The problem isn’t the fact that you end up sailing through the treetops via zip lines. That part of “aerial trekking” is actually quite fun. No, the problem is that you end up getting strapped into a harness that you wear around your thighs and buttocks that is not only uncomfortable, but is also quite unsightly. Let’s just say that it makes your shorts ride up into nooks and crevices that you didn’t even know existed.

At one point, I was standing on my tippy-toes hooked to a zip line waiting for my wife to zip from the platform I was on to a platform situated some distance away in another tree. To say that I was uncomfortable is an understatement as the wedgie that had already sunk three to four inches into my colon was moving even deeper. Unfortunately, Carolyn chose this inopportune moment to brake too early on her zipping and she got stuck right in the middle of two trees. As she was dangling from a rope in the middle of the jungle waiting to be saved by a Belizian Tarzan, my underwear was getting dangerously close to my small intestine.

In pain and still on the tips of my toes, I watched as a strong, agile, safety harnessless and wedgie-free Belizian jungle lifeguard shimmied out onto the rope and climbed hand over hand until he reached my wife. When he got to her, he wrapped his strong Belizian legs around her waist and pulled her to the safety of the next tree platform.

Once I finally made it to the next tree platform, I said to the guy, in a voice that was getting higher pitched by the second, “Hey, thanks for saving my wife.” In a very cool Belize/English accent, he replied, “No problem man.” Then he looked down at my very noticeable groin/harness/wedgie situation and said, “You’re lucky it was your wife, because you would have been on your own.”

The final humiliation took place only moments later when I was unceremoniously lowered to the ground while dozens of people stared up at me. At first, people seemed to be watching me just in case I fell to my death. However, as I got closer to the ground, I noticed a horrified mother cover the eyes of her children. Then, as I got really close to ground level, I saw some people pointing and staring, while others looked away in disgust.

Once on the ground, it took about five minutes to disengage from the harness but another 15 minutes to untangle my shorts from my internal organs. I slinked back to the bus mortified, feeling like I had just been violated by my own underpants. I’d never be able to face another three-pack of Fruit-of-the-Loom ever again.

The bus ride back to the cruise ship seemed to last forever. My kids went on and on about the thrill of zipping through the jungle canopy. I listened as my wife delighted in retelling how she had been saved by the “big, strong jungle man.” However, I just sat there somberly staring out the window and longing for more innocent times.