Oh Mexico,

Mexico Trip Recap! 

We went to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico which, is a cute fun little city that is not really built up like Cancun or any of the other "popular" vacation spots in Mexico. (side note: Annie and Sara, it was much more built up than when we went back in 2003)

Our hotel was called Mosquito Blue, which was located right on the main little street (5th Avenue) that is lined with shops, restaurants and little hotels.

OUR HOTEL:

It was a really cute little hotel with great ambiance and wonderful customer service. The guys at the front desk were always so helpful, nice, happy and smilely; I loved it!

The bad/funny part of the hotel was that the walls were super thin, like really thin.  We could hear everyone in the halls and just about everything going on around us. To make matters worse there was this show/club place right next door to our hotel called Coco Bongo. Apparently, it was a show everynight from 11:00pm until about 2:00am, then it turned into a club and the music would blare and the base was seriously thumping until 5:00am!!! Needless to say, every night/morning we would wake up at about 2:30am to Coco Bongo's jamming music and have to put the extra pillows over our heads to cover our ears.  We were almost tempted to get tickets to the Coco Bongo show just so we could witness what was waking us up every night...

Even more annoying than that was, get this, the early morning construction! I am talking like 7:00AM!!!

 We found this very (well annoying) but hilarious as well.  I mean, let's be honest have you EVER had a worker get  to your house before like 10:00am? We certainly haven't, so having them start working at 7:00am was just CrAzY to us!

       

                              

5TH AVENUE

Every night before and after dinner we would walk up and down the street checking out all the little shops, looking for the perfect souvenir abd getting ice cream!  Teh street was great because it wasn't very "Americanized" so we felt like we were walking through a real Mexican town noy just a tourist trap. They did a great job creating a wonderful ambience.     



Street Preformers

           

BEACH:

The beach was (of course) wonderful. With our hotel we got to claim one of these little beach bed things to layout on. They were fantastic! I obviously loved laying out, catching some rays, reading, swimming in the ocean and walking up and down the beach with Winship. However, I must say  I think my favorite thing to do at the beach was people watch. It was AMAZING, seriously maybe the best I have ever seen :)   

My least favorite thing about the beach was all the smokers, YUCK! Most of the people vacationing there were European and I seriously could not believe how much they all smoke, it was disgusting!

 

ACTIVITES: 

We went on two different Excursion Adventures while we were there.

 The first was an ATV ride through the "rain forest" and then swimming in Cenotes (which are underwater sinkholes filled by the natural rain fall water that sinks through the limestone)

The second Excursion Adventure was at  this place called Hidden Worlds where we took zip lines through the jungle, zip lines into Cenotes, a Roller Coaster through the Cenotes and into the water, repelling, and snorkeling in the Centoes. It was sooo cool! One of the best parts about the day was that we decided to go on a rainy day and not many other people were there because of the rain so we got to do it all just the two of us!

We kept on joking that we on the Bachelor because all our activities were things they always  do on the one on one dates on the Bachelor! (does anyone else still watch that show but us? If so, come on crazy nut job Michelle, way to represent Utah, yikes!)

*Please notice that Winship is the wuss wearing the wetsuit and I am the one toughing it out in my swimsuit in the not THAT cold of water!

 Backwards through the Cenote into the water...

This was the "rollercoaster" so scary but definitely fun and exhilarating!



Look at my face here, Amazing!



Repelling into the Cenote  

Upside down hanging by my feet so we could do the "superman kiss" It was the tour guides idea and they were super excited about it!

 
Snorkeling

 Exploring the Cenote's



This is a tree root. They grow through the limestone into the Cenote until they reach the water



One of the funniest/scariest part of the whole day for me was actually the transportation to and from this place. We signed up to go through a tour adventure company and the girl who sold it to us told us that transportation wasn't included in the price but "don't worry" she would take us to the bus and it was only $3 each way...
We are thinking oh, okay great that is pretty cheap, sounds good!  
She walks us to the "bus" which is really a van, we climb in and sit down thinking that it will be like the one from the day before where the van is specifically to take people to and from this particular excursion. Then as we sit there and the van fills up and I mean FILLS UP, like no more room anywhere, squeezing as many people in as possible, we realize we are the only tourists in the van. Humm, we start driving and realize that we are in what is like the public transportation for the area but have no idea where exactly we are going, how long it is supposed to take or how to tell the driver where we need to go. (Neither of us speak Spanish and of course No One on the bus spoke English) So, I start getting a bit concerned, especially because we had been driving for like 30 minutes, stopping every so often to let people off and pick more people up. Whenever there was anyone just standing on the side of the highway, the van would pull over and pick them up!  No bus stops needed, just stand on the side of the highway and a van will pick you up! 
I think the people sitting near us realized I was getting a little nervous so  a lady started talking to us, in Spanish, trying to help but we just had no idea what she was saying and her vise versa... 
Luckily we saw a sign for where we knew we were going so we did our best to signal to the driver that we needed to get off! 
Anyways, it was pretty funny and definitely added to the adventure of the day!  

This picture is of Winship after our adventure just  standing on the side of the highway waiting for the "bus" to pick us up and take us back to Playa!

DINING IN PLAYA DEL CARMEN

On our last night there, Sunday night, we were celebrating Valentine’s Day since we would be traveling home on the actual holiday.  We decided to go to this restaurant that had live music playing every night and looked pretty nice. We ordered Nachos as an appetizer (of course in Mexico right) so as we are about half way through the nachos I pick up a weird looking pieces of meat and then realize that it was not meat at all, but a screw! We could not believe it, how in the world did a screw get in our nachos? We showed our waitor then the manager came over to our table and took the screw from me and never came back...Didn't apologize, didn't try to explain.  Just came over, took it from me and walked away. In fact, no one came to our table for like 10 minutes after the screw was found until we finaly just grabbed our waiter and told him we were going to try somewhere else...

The restaurant we ended up at was much nicer and we ended up having a great meal, but certainly had to laugh at that!

Well, that pretty much sum up the trip, it was wonderful despite the quirky mishaps!

Annie and Sara, does this look familiar?

Although, I am pretty sure it was going out of business or something, there was never anyone there and it always looked like this, sad!