{"id":6914,"date":"2018-04-16T14:28:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T18:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/?p=6914"},"modified":"2024-08-31T15:27:34","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T19:27:34","slug":"una-semana-en-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/2018\/04\/16\/una-semana-en-mexico\/","title":{"rendered":"Una Semana en Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

We left cold, snowy Indiana for a week in the warmth and sun of Mexico. It was, almost completely, an excellent trip.<\/p>\n

Our home for the week was the Paradisus La Esmerelda resort in Playa del Carmen, about 45 minutes south of Cancun. Our flight down was without incident, we navigated the hour-long line that was Mexican immigration, gathered our bags, and found our transport agent, a man holding a sign with our family\u2019s name on it. The girls thought that was pretty cool. My sister-in-law who works in the travel industry had arranged the transport for us. I had to chuckle and wonder if she had tipped our driver about my musical likes, because as soon as we left the airport he switched the radio from Mexican music to one that played classic 80s and 90s music. The first song we heard was \u201cManeater\u201d by Hall & Oates. Nicely done, Mexico!<\/p>\n

The resort was very nice. Our room overlooked one of the resort\u2019s several pools. Sadly we were also right next to one of the main walkways, so we got noise throughout the night from people strolling about. And our next door neighbors liked to keep their three-year-old kid out until well after 9:00 PM each night, which meant he had a full meltdown when they tried to put him to bed. As our rooms had a connecting door, we could hear every single scream and shout from the kid. The parents apparently decided that it was better to let the kid shriek and disturb everyone around them rather than lay down with him or find another method of soothing him. On our final night, when we were all wiped out and in bed early, this went on for about 20 minutes. S lost all patience and went over and kicked the connecting door over and over, which made me laugh. The parents did remove their son to one of the bedrooms so his screams were at least muffled a bit.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the resort\u2026 Paradisus is an all-inclusive place. S and I had gone to all-inclusive places twice before with mixed results. Paradisus was excellent. There were something like 16 restaurants, although not all were open to kids. The food was always good to excellent. We had Asian-fusion, Mediterranean, modern Mexican, Japanese steakhouse-style, Italian, and ate at the buffet two nights. We also went to the buffet every morning but one. It was really, really good. I fell in love with combining chilaquiles<\/a> and scrambled eggs for breakfast. It\u2019s going to be my new breakfast thing here at home, too.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We also paid a little extra for the \u201cfamily concierge\u201d service. This got you some things like a fancy check-in service, a private pool that other guests were not allowed to use, and a personal concierge who was there to help you with all your needs. It was a slow week, so we \u201clucked\u201d into having two concierges. I use quotation marks because that meant we got to tip two people at the end of the week. Lucky us! Anyway, Eduardo and Fernando were very nice. They brought the girls cookies and milk each night, although the girls did not like the cookies since they were Mexican-style and much drier and grittier than what they were used to. They set up dinner reservations for us for the entire week. They answered questions. And the big event was drawing the girls a huge bubble bath in our balcony jacuzzi tub, complete with balloon animals and cupcakes. There was an insane amount of bubbles involved: when all three girls got into the tub, you could only see their faces and toes poking out. They loved it.<\/p>\n

Our days followed a regular rhythm: I usually woke up a little after 6:00 when the birds started chirping. One of the girls and I would then walk down to the beach to watch the sun rise. We never got a great sunrise, the point we were on looked east over a little grove of trees so we missed proper sunrise, but I got a few good pictures. Then we\u2019d go eat right when the buffet opened at 7:00. After that, we\u2019d take a walk, get our towels for the day, and claim some spots at the private pool. We\u2019d usually head back to the room for a bit and then return to the pool around 9:00. We\u2019d hang out there until noon-ish, eat lunch either right at the pool or at one of the outdoor restaurants, then continue hanging in the sun until late afternoon. We usually ate dinner at 6:30 and almost all of us were in bed and asleep by 9:30 most nights.<\/p>\n

The girls did a few activities with the Kids Club, but they were kind of silly and aimed at younger kids. We didn\u2019t take any trips into town or to visit any Mayan ruins either in Tulum or Chichen Itza. And the beach was a big disappointment. It was covered in some kind of nasty seaweed that washed up and rotted on the sand. So the area stunk and was full of small, flying insects that liked the rotting piles. Everyone told us this was unusual and was more typical of late summer than fall. There were crews out shoveling and using a Bobcat to move it, but it was a fruitless exercise as it just kept building up. S and I have been to Cancun and had told the girls about the beaches there, beautiful white sand and shallow, impossibly clear blue water that you can walk out into for several hundred feet and still just be knee-deep. So the expectation was pretty high for that kind of beach experience. They were disappointed, although we pointed out we still had a bunch of really nice pools. Even if the seaweed had not been present, the beach wasn\u2019t nearly as clean as Cancun\u2019s, once you got into the water it was very rocky, and the water was much more murky than 30 miles up the coast.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although this was my third trip to Mexico, I did experience something new: coatis<\/a>. We first saw them on Sunday morning at the pool. The girls started screaming about seeing ring-tailed lemurs. I said they looked like raccoons with long tails. Turns out I was closer to the truth: coatis are members of the raccoon family, although their tails are indeed rather lemur-like. They are active during the day and love to come out in packs of 5\u201320 and dig through trash, scavenge through leftover lunch trays, and take whatever you feed them. The younger ones, which have more colorful fur, are pretty cute. The older ones, which often turn gray and lose their fur, are borderline disgusting. One morning we found an old one hunched over on the stairs up to our floor. It looked like it had come in to die or something. We reversed course, took the elevator up, and then I walked down from above, slapping the stone steps hard until it scrambled back outside. There were also lots of big ass iguanas running around. One day one jumped up onto the lounge chair next to me. I heard scuffling, thought it was a bird, and just about pissed myself when I turned and saw this big lizard sitting two feet from me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We did have the inevitable stomach issues during and after the trip. M likely ate something bad on Wednesday, and threw up overnight and Thursday morning. C and L both had lower GI issues that caused some trouble. And I think all of us have had lower GI \u201clooseness\u201d since we got back. I\u2019m having some issues today, but let\u2019s stop right there. Some of that can just be attributed to the amount of food we ate, I think.<\/p>\n

C made a friend. The night we went to the Japanese steakhouse we sat by a family from the UK. We chatted them up and the next day their 10-year-old daughter and C started hanging together. They were kind of inseparable for the next five days. M and L also played with some sisters from New Jersey a couple days, but they didn\u2019t get nearly as friendly with them as C did with her friend.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time I spoke a fair amount of Spanish. Most of that is gone but I was able to recall and use a little last week. The waitstaff who were most comfortable with English enjoyed messing with customers who said more than \u201cPor favor\u201d and \u201cGracias\u201d to them. Most of our meals began like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cHola se\u00f1ores, \u00bfcomo est\u00e1n?\u201d
\n\u201cMuy bien, gracias, \u00bfy tu?\u201d
\n\u201cBien, gracias, \u00bfhablas espa\u00f1ol?\u201d
\n\u201cS\u00ed, pero muy, muy poquito. That\u2019s about all I can do, your English is much better than my Spanish!\u201d
\nAnd then we would all laugh.<\/p>\n

One day at the pool our waiter came around and greeted us \u201cHola amigos!\u201d I was talking to one of the girls at the time so instead of ordering a Dos Equis, I ordered \u201cDos Amigos.\u201d I immediately caught my mistake and corrected it, but our man Alejandro loved that. \u201cDos Amigos, se\u00f1or? Maybe dos amigas, right!?\u201d The rest of the day he\u2019d come by and ask, \u201c\u00bfSe\u00f1or, quires m\u00e1s Dos Amigos?\u201d and laugh again.<\/p>\n

Folks also liked to ask where we were from. Apparently Indianapolis isn\u2019t well known in Mexico so we ended up just saying \u201cnear Chicago.\u201d Then they would ask if it was much colder up there. When we told them our security camera showed the front yard covered in snow Monday morning they were all amazed.<\/p>\n

I believe those are the highlights. We had a very good week, the minor stomach issues excepted. It was relaxing, the girls were relatively well behaved, and we all came back with a little more skin color than we had when we left. Well C came back with a lot more, but she tans about 100 times faster than the rest of us.<\/p>\n

We were supposed to jump right into spring sports today. It is Opening Day for spring kickball and we had three games on the calendar, plus L had a soccer practice we were going to try to make after her game. Naturally it has been snowing all day and although none of it is sticking, the windchills are down in the 20s. We\u2019ve postponed all our games and are hoping the weather cooperates so we can get them in later this week. It is supposed to warm up quite a bit but there is also a chance of rain every day.<\/p>\n

But we can\u2019t complain after our lovely week in Mexico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We left cold, snowy Indiana for a week in the warmth and sun of Mexico. It was, almost completely, an excellent trip. Our home for the week was the Paradisus La Esmerelda resort in Playa del Carmen, about 45 minutes south of Cancun. Our flight down was without incident, we navigated the hour-long line that was Mexican immigration, gathered our bags, and found our transport agent, a man holding a sign with our family\u2019s name on it. The girls thought that was pretty cool. My sister-in-law who works in the travel industry had arranged the transport for us. I had to chuckle and wonder if she had tipped our driver about my musical likes, because as soon as we left the airport he switched the radio from Mexican music to one that played classic 80s and 90s music. The first song we heard was \u201cManeater\u201d by Hall & Oates. Nicely done, Mexico! The resort was very nice. Our room overlooked one of the resort\u2019s several pools. Sadly we were also right next to one of the main walkways, so we got noise throughout the night from people strolling about. And our next door neighbors liked to keep their three-year-old kid out until well after 9:00 PM each night, which meant he had a full meltdown when they tried to put him to bed. As our rooms had a connecting door, we could hear every single scream and shout from the kid. The parents apparently decided that it was better to let the kid shriek and disturb everyone around them rather than lay down with him or find another method of soothing him. On our final night, when we were all wiped out and in bed early, this went on for about 20 minutes. S lost all patience and went over and kicked the connecting door over and over, which made me laugh. The parents did remove their son to one of the bedrooms so his screams were at least muffled a bit. Anyway, the resort\u2026 Paradisus is an all-inclusive place. S and I had gone to all-inclusive places twice before with mixed results. Paradisus was excellent. There were something like 16 restaurants, although not all were open to kids. The food was always good to excellent. We had Asian-fusion, Mediterranean, modern Mexican, Japanese steakhouse-style, Italian, and ate at the buffet two nights. We also went to the buffet every morning but one. It was really, really good. I fell in love with combining chilaquiles and scrambled eggs for breakfast. It\u2019s going to be my new breakfast thing here at home, too. We also paid a little extra for the \u201cfamily concierge\u201d service. This got you some things like a fancy check-in service, a private pool that other guests were not allowed to use, and a personal concierge who was there to help you with all your needs. It was a slow week, so we \u201clucked\u201d into having two concierges. I use quotation marks because that meant we got to tip two people at the end of the week. Lucky us! Anyway, Eduardo and Fernando were very nice. They brought the girls cookies and milk each night, although the girls did not like the cookies since they were Mexican-style and much drier and grittier than what they were used to. They set up dinner reservations for us for the entire week. They answered questions. And the big event was drawing the girls a huge bubble bath in our balcony jacuzzi tub, complete with balloon animals and cupcakes. There was an insane amount of bubbles involved: when all three girls got into the tub, you could only see their faces and toes poking out. They loved it. Our days followed a regular rhythm: I usually woke up a little after 6:00 when the birds started chirping. One of the girls and I would then walk down to the beach to watch the sun rise. We never got a great sunrise, the point we were on looked east over a little grove of trees so we missed proper sunrise, but I got a few good pictures. Then we\u2019d go eat right when the buffet opened at 7:00. After that, we\u2019d take a walk, get our towels for the day, and claim some spots at the private pool. We\u2019d usually head back to the room for a bit and then return to the pool around 9:00. We\u2019d hang out there until noon-ish, eat lunch either right at the pool or at one of the outdoor restaurants, then continue hanging in the sun until late afternoon. We usually ate dinner at 6:30 and almost all of us were in bed and asleep by 9:30 most nights. The girls did a few activities with the Kids Club, but they were kind of silly and aimed at younger kids. We didn\u2019t take any trips into town or to visit any Mayan ruins either in Tulum or Chichen Itza. And the beach was a big disappointment. It was covered in some kind of nasty seaweed that washed up and rotted on the sand. So the area stunk and was full of small, flying insects that liked the rotting piles. Everyone told us this was unusual and was more typical of late summer than fall. There were crews out shoveling and using a Bobcat to move it, but it was a fruitless exercise as it just kept building up. S and I have been to Cancun and had told the girls about the beaches there, beautiful white sand and shallow, impossibly clear blue water that you can walk out into for several hundred feet and still just be knee-deep. So the expectation was pretty high for that kind of beach experience. They were disappointed, although we pointed out we still had a bunch of really nice pools. Even if the seaweed had not been present, the beach wasn\u2019t nearly as clean as Cancun\u2019s, once you got into the water it was very rocky, and the water was much more murky than 30 miles up the coast. Although this was my third trip to Mexico, I did experience something new: coatis. We first saw them on Sunday morning at the pool. The girls started screaming about seeing ring-tailed lemurs. I said they looked like raccoons with long tails. Turns out I was closer to the truth: coatis are members of the raccoon family, although their tails are indeed rather lemur-like. They are active during the day and love to come out in packs of 5\u201320 and dig through trash, scavenge through leftover lunch trays, and take whatever you feed them. The younger ones, which have more colorful fur, are pretty cute. The older ones, which often turn gray and lose their fur, are borderline disgusting. One morning we found an old one hunched over on the stairs up to our floor. It looked like it had come in to die or something. We reversed course, took the elevator up, and then I walked down from above, slapping the stone steps hard until it scrambled back outside. There were also lots of big ass iguanas running around. One day one jumped up onto the lounge chair next to me. I heard scuffling, thought it was a bird, and just about pissed myself when I turned and saw this big lizard sitting two feet from me. We did have the inevitable stomach issues during and after the trip. M likely ate something bad on Wednesday, and threw up overnight and Thursday morning. C and L both had lower GI issues that caused some trouble. And I think all of us have had lower GI \u201clooseness\u201d since we got back. I\u2019m having some issues today, but let\u2019s stop right there. Some of that can just be attributed to the amount of food we ate, I think. C made a friend. The night we went to the Japanese steakhouse we sat by a family from the UK. We chatted them up and the next day their 10-year-old daughter and C started hanging together. They were kind of inseparable for the next five days. M and L also played with some sisters from New Jersey a couple days, but they didn\u2019t get nearly as friendly with them as C did with her friend. Once upon a time I spoke a fair amount of Spanish. Most of that is gone but I was able to recall and use a little last week. The waitstaff who were most comfortable with English enjoyed messing with customers who said more than \u201cPor favor\u201d and \u201cGracias\u201d to them. Most of our meals began like this: \u201cHola se\u00f1ores, \u00bfcomo est\u00e1n?\u201d \u201cMuy bien, gracias, \u00bfy tu?\u201d \u201cBien, gracias, \u00bfhablas espa\u00f1ol?\u201d \u201cS\u00ed, pero muy, muy poquito. That\u2019s about all I can do, your English is much better than my Spanish!\u201d And then we would all laugh. One day at the pool our waiter came around and greeted us \u201cHola amigos!\u201d I was talking to one of the girls at the time so instead of ordering a Dos Equis, I ordered \u201cDos Amigos.\u201d I immediately caught my mistake and corrected it, but our man Alejandro loved that. \u201cDos Amigos, se\u00f1or? Maybe dos amigas, right!?\u201d The rest of the day he\u2019d come by and ask, \u201c\u00bfSe\u00f1or, quires m\u00e1s Dos Amigos?\u201d and laugh again. Folks also liked to ask where we were from. Apparently Indianapolis isn\u2019t well known in Mexico so we ended up just saying \u201cnear Chicago.\u201d Then they would ask if it was much colder up there. When we told them our security camera showed the front yard covered in snow Monday morning they were all amazed. I believe those are the highlights. We had a very good week, the minor stomach issues excepted. It was relaxing, the girls were relatively well behaved, and we all came back with a little more skin color than we had when we left. Well C came back with a lot more, but she tans about 100 times faster than the rest of us. We were supposed to jump right into spring sports today. It is Opening Day for spring kickball and we had three games on the calendar, plus L had a soccer practice we were going to try to make after her game. Naturally it has been snowing all day and although none of it is sticking, the windchills are down in the 20s. We\u2019ve postponed all our games and are hoping the weather cooperates so we can get them in later this week. It is supposed to warm up quite a bit but there is also a chance of rain every day. But we can\u2019t complain after our lovely week in Mexico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,143,14,22],"class_list":["post-6914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-family","tag-mexico","tag-parenting","tag-travel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6914"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13421,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6914\/revisions\/13421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}