The site is 21 kilometers of bad road from the nearest city.

Friday, November 30, 2001

The site is 21 kilometers of bad road from the nearest city. There’s no drinking water, and the only source of electricity is the sun. Jaguars and crocodiles roam the jungle. It’s an area where Blackbeard the pirate once sailed.

This is where Ruth and Andy Sanders, former owners of Sanders Drug in Albert Lea, have built their dream.

The couple operates Sand-Wood Villas, a scuba diving resort on the Caribbean Sea in southern Mexico, just north of Belize. After teaching scuba diving at the Albert Lea YMCA for decades – and diving themselves whenever they got a spare minute – they decided to start building the resort in 1993.

The name comes from a combination of Sanders and Elwood; local veterinarian Steve Elwood is a part-owner.

The remote resort is an exotic operation in the middle of rough Mexican terrain. Solar panels backed up by a generator provide the electricity. Trucks ship in fresh drinking water and groceries. Native Americans who still speak the Mayan language staff the resort. Guests stay in thatched-roof villas overlooking the sea.

&uot;It’s just something that we decided to do,&uot; Ruth Sanders said. &uot;Everybody thought we were crazy, and our kids did too, but now they all love it.&uot;

Sanders Drug, founded by Andy’s father in 1915, was located on North Broadway where a parking lot now sits. The Sanders family left the store to start the scuba diving retreat near Xcalac, Mexico.

The family had been to the area many times to dive, viewing the many shipwrecks and the pristine underwater life of the area offshore.

Scuba diving has been the Sanders family passion since Andy began teaching at the YMCA in the 1970s. Ruth began teaching her own courses 12 years later, and the family’s three kids all soon learned the sport.

The hobby was a perfect family activity, they said; in fact, they credit it with keeping the family together.

&uot;If one of the kids was going to have a girlfriend, she would have had to be a scuba diver,&uot; Ruth Sanders said.

Since they set up the resort, they’ve had many visits from a group of friends from the Albert Lea area, including their former travel agent, David Nelson of Four Seasons Travel in Albert Lea. They took to calling themselves the Xcalak Dive Team, after the name of a nearby town in Mexico.

&uot;It seems every time we go, we have some kind of adventure,&uot; Nelson said.

The group loves the Sand-Wood resort because it’s not too clogged by boatloads of other divers; they can get underwater and just relax, they said. The appeal of scuba diving is the relaxation, along with the adventure, they said.

&uot;You feel like you’re doing something, something that makes you feel like you’re living,&uot; Nelson said.

The group’s last excursion, taken by Nelson and fellow Dive Team member Greg Bird of Austin in September, turned out to be more of an adventure than they bargained for. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks took place while they were in Mexico, and their flight back was canceled.

They remember getting a phone call telling them about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, then turning on CNN just before the second plane’s impact.

&uot;It took the wind out of our sails,&uot; Bird said.

After being marooned in Mexico for days, along with hundreds of other frantic Americans desperate to return home, they finally found a way back when a Carnival cruise ship pulled into port. After initially refusing to take on extra passengers, the ship’s crew decided to allow it. After a two-day cruise, Nelson and Bird arrived in Florida, and found a flight back home.

&uot;Before the trip, we were kind of wondering what kind of adventure we were going to have this time,&uot; Nelson said.