Vacation in Mexico

We left early on Saturday morning to fly straight to Cancun. We left the kids with Madelyne, Autumn, Jennifer and Laraine. It takes a village. You should see the spreadsheet. 

Read the book below, or watch the movie here: https://youtu.be/FyZih-VR47o

We arrived at the Secrets Maroma resort in Playa del Carmen in the rain. It's a pretty all-inclusive resort that looks suspiciously like Secrets Wild Orchid in Montego Bay. I took a nap and explored Mexico TV while TB went to a meeting. We met up for dinner at El Patio with Maxfields, Jones, Heslops. 

The next morning, we walked out to the pool and sat there all day. I read The Martian, which is SO GOOD.  

In the afternoon, we talked our friends into piloting kayaks out to the breakers, then we sat by the pool until dinner time. We ate at Seaside Grill with Huttons, Maxfields, and Jones. 

Then we parked ourselves on the beach and watched the supermoon eclipse. 

The next day, we ate at the breakfast buffet again, and signed up for the jungle tour on bikes. There's no way anyone could have enough bug spray for this activity. 

We don't usually wear so much safety gear for bike rides. 

 Then, we sat by the pool or the beach and read and talked and ordered food and drinks. 

We went to dinner at Portofino with Heslops. It was ridiculously hot and we sweated the whole time. We also ordered enough food for eight people, so we had to roll back to our room.  

We shopped with friends at the sidewalk market set up at the resort, then we met the Maxfields at the Beatles tribute show, which was crazy.

The next morning, we ate at the buffet, sat by the pool, and went snorkeling. 

A few more pool selfies and it was time to go. Get a load of my Mexican sunglasses. They've got everything: purple metallic paint, cheetah print, big fake diamonds. 

 

Good bye Secrets!

We headed out with the Maxfields to check out El Chameleon, which is a very pretty golf club. You can ride kayaks in perfectly clear water in a canyon that winds through the course, but we didn't do that. 

The Maxfields drove us down to Tulum on a road where the speed limit changes about every kilometer. We checked into El Pez at Turtle Cove, which was an outrageously cute boutique hotel on the beach street of Tulum, which is a fantastically cool hippie town. We sat on the patio and ordered drinks and appetizers and just couldn't imagine why we'd ever go anywhere else. 

The waiter asked us if we wanted to "come see the turtles" so we walked onto the beach where the night guard was scooping tiny turtles out of the sand into a crate. The turtle conservation group usually marks all the nests and monitors them, but this one was a surprise, so the hotel people scooped up the babies and called the turtle biologist. She counted the turtles (110+ in this nest!) and released them just around the corner from the hotel.

 The next day, we had breakfast at El Pez and watched fishermen in the water outside our cabana.

 We stocked up on necessities and junk at the grocery store and went to the Zona Archeologica at Tulum. It was crazy hot and we were sweating in just a second.

 We took a quick dip in the ocean just below the ruins. 

The concierge at El Pez directed us to follow an unnamed road past a hotel toward the water where we would find a restaurant made up of plastic chairs and folding tables on the beach. The place is called Juan Chamico after the fisherman who brings in his catch, where it is prepared over primitive oven in a kitchen with no electricity and no plumbing. There's no menu, you just have what they have. The food was incredibly fresh and delicious. 

We snorkeled out to the breakers, and Ellen and I raced back to beat a thunderstorm off in the distant jungle. It was so pretty and comfortable out in the water. We saw a brain coral shaped like a brain, but bigger than my desk. We sat on that beach all afternoon.

For dinner, we headed to La Zebra which is a charming boutique hotel with a delightful Mexican cantina. 

 On Thursday, we went to a cenote in the middle of a lagoon called Laguna Kaan Luum. It looks cool in websites and some photos, but we thought it was creepy. It's like a regular lagoon that just drops off in the middle to 85 feet deep. There was some kind of weird water massage deal going on at the edge of the dock so we snorkeled for a minute and then hit the road. Weird.  

 We went to see the ruins at Muyil, which was a pretty trail through the jungle around a whole complex of ancient rock buildings. We thought it was pretty neat. 

 There was a long walk on a boardwalk through the jungle (again with the bug bites, will it ever end?) to a rickety watchtower where we climbed above the canopy and looked out at the big lagoons. 

 Our boat captain, Candido, met us at the dock and boated us across a lagoon and into a "natural canal" through the grass. 

We jetted through another lagoon, and a little way into another canal, where we tied up at a dock, walked into a Mayan temple that hosts lots of bats now, and then we jumped into the canal. We snorkeled and floated in the clear water through the mangroves. We could hardly breathe due to all the laughing and joking. We swam against the current as long as we could until we ended up at another dock where Candido was waiting with our sandals. We hiked back to the boat on a very long boardwalk, and boated back across the lagoons. 

Todd and Nalin had to borrow Candido's bike to get back to the car. It was hilarious more than it was necessary.

We ate fresh fish and seafood for lunch at El Camello Jr, shopped for souvenirs in town and sat (napped) on the pretty beach in front of La Zebra. We cleaned up for dinner at Mezzanine that evening. 

On Friday morning, we said good bye to Ellen and Nalin, who were so fun to adventure with us. We had a long day of traveling home, but we were glad to see the kids. Ikey cried a little and Jovie yelled a little. "We are lucky to have been where we have been and lucky to be coming home again."