Almost two weeks after our return, I thought I might finally put down a few words about our trip to Mexico. It was fantastic. As I've told my coworkers, I was honestly afraid I would get bored. My vacations tend to be more of the adventurous, get up early to beat the crowds, change hostels and cities (never hotels - too expensive) every day or two, sightsee till we drop kinds of affairs, and this was more of a relaxed beach vacation. As it turns out, John is more amusing than I remembered, and I honestly wasn't bored at all except for the day he spent 2 hours working on the stake directory and an hour finishing up something from work.
We stayed in a resort right on the beach, which was nice, and spent a lot of time shuffling between the beach, the pool, and our air conditioned room. In addition to Marie Antoinette, we watched Stranger than Fiction (which John liked despite protesting before the fact that it didn't sound interesting, that he definitely would NOT like it, and that he didn't want to watch it) and John got his fill of CNN and the other 24 hour news channels, since we don't pay for cable at home. I think that may have been his favorite part of the vacation, in fact.
It was an all inclusive, so we spent quite a bit of time eating, too, of course. The Italian restaurant was probably our favorite. We heard from some of the other guests who had booked all inclusives at other resorts before that the food better than in most packages of this sort. We purposely booked a hotel a little removed from the main Cancun action, and as a result, most of the other people at the resort were either couples (lots of honeymooners; we were old timers) or families. No spring break vibe at all, which was nice.
Because I can't go on vacation anywhere without seeing at least some ruins, we went to Chichen Itza one of the days we were there. It was neat to see the main building and learn a little more about Mayan culture. I had seen pictures before, of course, but understood virtually nothing about why the building was constructed the way it was or what it represented. Basically, it's a huge calendar with every step on every side representing a day. It gets more complicated than that, but going on might be a little much for a blog entry. If you're interested, I'm sure google and wikipedia have lots of fascinating information to offer.
As it turned out, that day was probably the low point of our vacation. John had worked until 5 a.m. the morning we left finishing a memo and some other materials for a deal at work (well, almost finishing; he also worked on the plane and for an hour or so once we got to the resort). As it turned out, they decided he should be on a conference call for an approval meeting being held while we were gone. 10 minutes after I booked our nonrefundable trip to Chichen Itza, we found out that his meeting was planned for an hour while we were scheduled to be in transit, on the road back from the ruins. At first, John was sure he would have cell coverage, but as we realized on the way there, that was not to be. So, we paid $80 to take a cab back to the hotel, where we found it was $5 a minute to call from a land line. He then called in from his cell phone only to find that the room was sort of an urban canyon with only one spot having a reliable signal. This spot was about 12 inches further from the outlet than the length of his charger cord, so when his battery ran dead, a not-so-fun game of call, get dropped, call back ensued. He got a little grumpy.
Thankfully, we recovered nicely and went on to have a fantastic finish to the vacation. The next day, we rode bikes to the ruins at Tulum, which were only 2 or 3 miles from the hotel. The day after that, we went snorkeling. Because ocean conditions were too rough, most of the ocean snorkeling had been cancelled. However, we did go snorkeling in a cenote (basically a cave where the roof of the cave has collapsed leaving a pool of fresh water), in a lagoon (although we couldn't swim out to sea), and in a cave. The fresh water snorkeling in the cenote and in the cave was what the guides like to call "refreshing" and what I call "cold," but it was worth it. The cave was the shortest but probably the most different from other snorkeling I've done. It was really amazing to see all the stalactites and stalagmites (pretty sure I just butchered the spelling there) along with all the water. And a few catfish. The next coolest part was the stingray we saw in the lagoon. John actually saw two, the second of which was apparently enormous, but I only saw the first one.
Since we got back, we've been busy as usual with work (John) and work plus everything else (such as cleaning, laundry, coordinating with contractors to get some stuff done on the apartment, etc - me). I hope I'm nearing the end of the contractor negotiation phase and moving into the actually getting the work done phase as I can't seem to rest easy until the room for the baby is ready. Seriously, can you start nesting at 4.5 months? This has been going on for quite a few weeks now, and I think I might drive both of us crazy before the baby comes . . .
