I was so excited to go to Mexico for 5 days but I must admit I was a little nervous too.. I am sometimes a glass half full kind of girl and I was a little worried that something would go wrong.. I mean, I was spending 5 whole days with another couple and I have to admit, that I may not be the best person to hang out with for 5 continuous days.. The other couple we went with were one of our best friends and I didn't want anything to jeopardize this. Heck, sometimes I may not want to spend 5 continuous days with my own husband. What if sometime crazy happens on vacation and we can't be friends anymore? I am such a worrier.. I am sure I am going to have a heart attack at the age of 50.. Luckily, we all got along perfectly and had a great time. Curt and I laughed because after about 24 hours of being separated from Michael and Kristin, we had to admit we missed being with them everyday. I just think we need to plan another vacation soon. :) I will give a little plug for our travel agent/agency, they were amazing! We had a little problem with our bank on Thursday morning (the only real issue we had for the entire trip.. Make sure you always double check that your bank knows you are going to be out of the country...) and our travel agent called us and helped us through everything. Also, they told us to travel the week we did because it would be way cheaper and the hotels would be empty because it was right after Labor Day and they were spot on. We were told that the week before the hotel was at full capacity and the week after they would be at 80% but our week they were at about 40-50% capacity. This was amazing because we didn't have to wait for anything and fight through a crowd for anything..
This is the view from our room. It was absolutely amazing. I honestly wish I was there currently. The sand was so white and the water was an amazing blue color and was pretty clear. What this photo doesn't show you is that it had about 2054278792% humidity. We had a note in our room stating that Riveria Maya (where we were) has one of the highest percent of humidity in the whole Caribbean.. Boy was that true.. The first night I did my hair all pretty and walked outside and it was completely ruined and wet in about 3 minutes. It was pretty amazing really how humid it was. I kept a pack of gum in my room and took it back to Missouri with me and now the paper is glued to the gum because it got so wet in the room and then dried.. We got so lucky because it only rained for about an hour one day at about 9pm. We were in the lobby which was completely open when the rain poured down. The hotel workers had the lobby closed up in literally 2 minutes. It was like watching a Nascar pit crew (this will probably be my only Nascar reference as I hate this awful "sport"). Otherwise the weather was a beautiful sunny and 85 degrees. Perfect weather for every white person on earth to get scorched by the sun. I luckily didn't get to sunburned.. However, we all were very amused by the sunburned patterns on our fellow resort goers.. Some people did not believe in any sunscreen and looked like a red Christmas light and some people used sunscreen but only it patches.. I couldn't help but wonder what their crazy peeling will look like later.. Man I am a weird person...
We did venture off of the resort to a snorkeling/zipling resort called Xel-Ha. See photo below :)
I was a little hesitant to go off of the resort.. Hello, I could get kidnapped and die! Okay really, I have only tried snorkeling once before this time and it was an epic fail. Random fact about Hannah, I do not swim well and I do not float well and I do not breathe well. All of these combinations do not bode well for snorkeling and spending all day snorkeling did not sound too wonderful... I only got talked into it because Curt was so, so thrilled about going snorkeling.. This was one of those pick your battles moments.... If we traveled to one of the best snorkeling places in the world and I didn't make Curt feel like he and I wanted to go then I may have failed as a wife.. Plus I was excited about zipling. So on Friday morning off we went to this park. It was actually really cool. It was a 60+ acre through a rain forest with a river leading into the bay plus you could eat and drink all day long.. This was definitely an added perk.. We started about by snorkeling in a freezing cold river.. We saw some neat fish but I was a little scared because there were all sorts of tree over hangs and rocks that made me think snake.. I would definitely not swim in these waters if we were in Missouri... It didn't help that on our way to the park our tour guide told us that we may see a few pythons on the paths and if we do, just to alert a park ranger.. They would be alerted by my screaming... Thankfully we did not see any snakes. We also did some cliff diving at this park. You would snorkel up to these marked off cliffs and go up the stairs and jump off. I believe the cliffs we jumped were about 15 feet up.. It was weird because after you jumped, you had enough time to think about hitting the water before you did. I was very scared to do this but I am glad I did because it was a ton of fun. I think the European guys snorkeling next to us were glad I did too because I totally lost my swimsuit top... in crystal clear water... Oops..... Zipling was a ton of fun too.. We ziplined over water and then we would have to let go. It was cool because you could see all the fishies while you were flying over them.. It was definitely worth the money.... Snorkeling was fun too.. We saw some really cool fish/jellyfish/shells. We saw a school of fish when we were snorkeling.. That was so amazing to think that a group of animals could swim so in sync. (It was so hard not to write N'SYNC... My 90's boy band obsession is coming out here....). We saw a really big rainbow sherbet colored fish. It was by far my favorite.. We saw a manatee from afar.. They may be my new favorite animal.. They are a sea cow! How awesome! I call myself a manatee and Curt tells me to stop but hey, I am drawn to these weird animals! I will admit that I got very tired of snorkeling at the end.. I held on to Curt and he told me when to look down.. My snorkeling routine was looking at the fish for about 20 seconds then come up and remove my mouth piece and cough out all of the water I swallowed.. I have no idea why but I am terrible at breathing through my nose.. I had to laugh because I am pretty sure Michael had the same routine as me.. Apparently only Kristin and Michael could comprehend the basics of snorkeling.. Go Figure!!
The rest of our trip was spent eating, drinking and relaxing by water. We happened to go to Mexico on their independence day which was a very big deal to them and rightfully so. We went to Jamaica on their independence day also. Apparently Curt and I have a knack for going to other countries when they are having a huge celebration.. It was cool to see another county's patriotism.. The food was so good. We had a pretty normal buffet for breakfast and lunch. The omlet they made for breakfast was amazing. Dinner though was amazing. We sampled all of their dinner restaurants. We ate at a Mexican, French, Seafood and Steak, Italian and Japanese restaurant. We had an appetizer, main course and dessert at every place we went. The resort also had a coffee shop with delicious cakes and pastries.. I had a mocha frappe every day with dessert.. It is safe to say that I gained about 10 lbs or so.. Don't worry, my friend Kristin ate just as much as me but she ran 10 miles each day...... I didn't even know where the gym was... I will give you a short overview of the drinks.. They were so delicious.. I can't ever order a margarita again but they can't touch how amazing they were in Mexico. I drank about a million of these delicious drinks in 5 days.. My liver is thanking me for being back into my normal routine of not drinking tequilla everyday. :)
We had to be dragged out of resort after five days.. None of us wanted to go.. We did have a little laugh on the way to the airport.. We had to pick up this very tall man at a different hotel to take to the airport with us.. Apparently the bellman was having trouble/was slow at getting his bag down to the lobby after the man gave him the bag.. Our little driver was upset because we were going to be late (he must be on a strict schedule because we were plenty early..) and told the very tall man that he was going to leave him.. The tall man told the driver that he couldn't do anything and nicely asked him if he wanted him to superman the bag to him.. We couldn't stop laughing about supermaning the bag.. Luckily we got the airport in plenty of time and had a nice flight.. We went through Apple vacations and they chartered DirectTv and 4 movies on the plane of us so the flight we quick. I watched Brave and Dark Shadows and Curt watched the Avengers.. I'm highly recommending Apple Vacations as they were awesome....
I'm sad to say that I think this may be our last big vacation for awhile. We are expecting some changes in our life hopefully soon that will probably leave us with less disposable income to travel for awhile but I am going to go back sometime.. I have placed this on my bucket list.. I will leave you with photos of Curt and I and Kristin and Michael on our vacation. Notice the sweet tan as it is now sweet white.. As always, thanks for reading!
H
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