Mexico day 3: Sunday in Cozumel

So, I left off in my last post just after having arrived at Villa Rosmar. This was a beautiful five bedroom house which was right on the beach up north of Cozumel's only town. It had two levels--on the main floor were the two sitting areas, the dining room, the kitchen, and one bedroom. In the very center was a little atrium.

On the second floor were four more bedrooms--enough for each couple to have their own room, except for me and Kevin, who shared a room with Matthew. (There were two queen beds in our room, though, so it was fine.) All but one of the rooms also had their own bathroom, plus there was a half bath on the ground floor.






Two rooms had balconies overlooking the ocean, one of which also had a really nice bed--the masterbedroom. My parents got the honor of having this room. (We would have given it to Matthew, but since he needed to share a room with us, we had to have one with two beds!)

We also had our own pool! Right between the ocean and the house. It was really perfect. The beach out front was gorgeous--white sand, blue green water, gentle waves.

After we got settled a bit, as I mentioned before, Heidi and Michael and I set out to buy some food at the grocery store. Michael and I walked down to a nearby hotel (about half a mile a way or something) where there were a line of taxis. I had to stop by the hotel anyway to get some payment squared away for a snorkeling trip we were doing on Monday (I'll tell more about that later), and then we took the taxi back to the villa to pick up Heidi, and off we went into town to find a grocery store.

It was a huge "Mega" brand store, a lot like a nicer version of Walmart. The best part was the bakery section...mmm....and the produce. Michael helped us pick out some traditional Mexican items like cajete (basically caramel syrup) and various yummy breads. The food was all upstairs, and you had to get a shopping cart from downstairs and ride with it up the escalator ramp. This was all well and good, but we got a little nervous once we had to take our loaded shopping cart back down the escalator--wouldn't it just roll down out of our control? But, we found to our relief that the wheel have a special groove thing that connects with some ridges on the escalator ramp, holding it in place.

Everyone eagerly ate the food when we arrived back. Then we had a little surprise "coronation" ceremony. The rest of us had decided that we wanted to do something to thank Matthew for footing the whole bill for this amazing trip. So, we decided to crown him "King of Rosmar". Heidi brought a crown, robe, and sceptor, and the rest of us brought him little gag gifts that were supposed to be related to his new title. Heidi gave him a funny flashing pen and a note pad to write his decrees with. My parents gave him a hand-held electric fan (since they couldn't find a lackey with a passport), and we gave him a set of plastic hands that clapped and made noise (since we might not always be around to give him the proper applause) plus some fake purple hair extensions to add to his majestic image. Michael and Margert gave him some cards from a game that he used to play as a kid...which were actually mostly already his, apparently (I guess Michael had had them at his house?) Matthew really hammed it up, and we had a lot of fun calling him "El Rey" for the rest of the week.

My family also surprised me by giving me a little angel sculpture by Willow Tree and a blow up globe beach ball--to thank me for planning the trip. I was in on the part for Matthew, but I had no idea they had anything up their sleeve for me--how nice of them! I had to laugh, too, because my presents were actually *real* ones, not like Matthew's gag gifts. Heidi offered to get him an angel scultpure too, but he said he was very happy with his regal gear.

Later that evening, our cook arrived. Matthew decided to hire a cook for the 6 days we were at the Villa. She cooked 2 meals a day for us--breakfast and either lunch or dinner. It was not cheap, but it was soooo nice to have basically a restaurant right there in the villa. She brought the food, cooked it, and cleaned up every night. The cooking was good stuff, too--very authentic Mexican (except not as spicey I suppose) and very tastey.

She was there quite late on Saturday night, because after cleaning up everything from the meal, she also prepared the following day's meals for us almost all the way, and left them in the fridge. Sunday is the cook's day off, and since we were only going to be there 6 days instead of 7 (but we still had to pay for the full week), I convinced the cook service manager to have the cook just leave the ingredients for Sunday's meals in the fridge and we'd cook them ourselves. We thought she'd just leave the raw ingredients, but she did all the preparation besides the actual cooking for us the night before.

The next day was Sunday, and we all slept in and lounged around until about noon or 12:30. We took a cab into town to the address I'd found for the local congregation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We went to the 1:00 Sacrament Meeting, and got there just as they were starting. The congregation was fairly small, but boy did they sing with gusto! They sounded twice as loud as my local ward, with less than half the people--and no piano! (After the opening hymn, though, Michael went up to the Bishop and offered to have Margret accompany the rest of the singing on the piano--they did have a piano, just no one to play it. He accepted, and I think they enjoyed having the accompianiment. The chorister was a little hesitant, although she got used to it.) We noticed how, without a piano, the chorister actually has everyone watching and following her. Back home, it's always the pianist who is really in control.

Anyways, I didn't understand much of the meeting, it being in Spanish after all, but I DEFINITELY felt the Spirit. It was quite strong during the hymns, especially. We didn't stay for Sunday School since it was all in Spanish, but I'm really glad we made it to Sacrament Meeting.

The rest of the day we just relaxed and lounged around. After dinner, we had a blast playing some games. Margret had brought a game called "Boxers or Briefs?" which, despite its title, is NOT scandalous and is actually lots of fun. A little like Apples to Apples, only better. We were really cracking up hard playing that game. My brother-in-law Brian turned absolutely purple with laughter--I've never seen him laugh that hard! It was a great day of recovering from our adventures and being together as a family.

Mexico Day 2: Chichen Itza!

Saturday was our most adventurous day! A little warning before I get started: in my last post I promised they would be shorter in the future. Well, I'm already breaking my promise! This post is *not* short. Feel free to just look at the pics if you want.

We got up bright and early on Saturday morning in order to catch the first "colectivo" (which is kind of a shuttle van/shared taxi sort of thing) to Chichen Itza from Valladolid. I had read that they line up across from the bus station and the first ones leave at 7:15. When we got there, there was only one small colectivo (a car, not a van), but luckily, my brother Michael speaks Spanish fluently since he served his mission in Mexico, so he was able to talk to the driver and have him call up another colectivo--a large van this time. When he arrived, all 13 of us piled in. It was about a 40 minute drive to the ruin site, and unfortunately, the van did NOT have A/C (I had read that the colectivos generally do, but whatever.) Michael talked to the guy in Spanish as we drove and arranged to have him come pick us back up at about 11:30 or something like that, which was nice because we didn't have to worry about finding another colectivo to come back.

We wanted to be there right when C.I. opened because that way we could escape the intense heat and bigger crowds of mid-day. Because of the swine flu scare, though, there wasn't much in the way of crowds to worry about! But, we were VERY grateful that we came early because by the time we left around noon, it was EXTREMELY hot. The temperature was in the high nineties, with tons of humidity.

So when we arrived, there was almost nobody there. The first thing we did was load up on the sunscreen. My niece Anna found this extremely traumatic for some reason. Matthew took some pictures of this first excitement of the day, and then snapped a brilliant shot of Anna looking defeated and dejected, having been forced by her stone-hearted parents to go through the horrendous ordeal of putting on sunscreen despite her defiant stand.

We went through the line and bought our tickets, then walked down a little path leading to the ruins.

On the way, we saw our first iguana of the day (which was to be followed by many others--I guess they like basking on ancient architecture.) As we walked the end of the path, we caught our first view of "El Castillo," the iconic and behemothic temple that stands in the center of Chichen Itza.

I had seen lots of pictures of this temple before, but it more massive in person! We stood around just oggling for a while, taking it in.

Then Heidi showed us a trick she had heard from some friends who had been there before--if you stand in front of the temple and clap your hands, the echo comes back sounding like a bird cry. So of course we all had to try that (and it was true, by the way!)



Sadly, you are no longer allowed to climb to the top of El Castillo, so we had to be content to just observe it from the bottom.

But observe it we did! There is actually a huge amount of other ruins in Chichen Itza as well--several other temples, an ancient Mayan ball court, a sacred cenote (which is a pool created by an underground river and a collapsed cave), and lots of other stuff.



We also discovered that the Mayans must have invented tic-tac-toe, because we found some carvings of x's and o's in a grid. Looks like o's won this game!

We wandered around looking at it all, taking several breaks in the shade because of the heat. In fact, we didn't even see everything there was to see by the time we had to meet our colectivo again.

But, we were pretty much bushed by that time, so it was all for the best I suppose. If this trip had been just me and Kevin, I'm sure I would have stayed a bit longer and also gone to see some other nearby ruins (where you *could* still climb the pyramids), but this was a family trip and the point was not just to sight-see, so I contented myself with what we did see.

The Mayan people who lived at C.I. were obsessed with human sacrifice, and this is definitely reflected in the architecture.

We saw a stone statue of a soon-to-be sacrificial victim, and carvings of birds and snakes about to eat human hearts that had just been ripped from their bodies.

There was a huge wall of carved skulls, and some carvings showing warriors holding severed heads of their defeated enemies. In the sacred cenote, archaeologists found jewelry and gold and many, many skeletons of human sacrifices that had been thrown in the pool--many of which were children. Even the ball court was kind of tainted, because the loser (or possibly the winner--they're not sure) of the bounce-the-rubber-ball-through-the-hoop-without-your hands game were sacrificed to the gods too. Ugh! That was fairly creepy to think about. Mostly, I tried not to.

The ball court was quite impressive to see, though. Apparently, this is (one of?) the biggest Mayan ball courts ever found, and some archaeologists think it was probably not actually used for ball games--just for show, because it would have been too big to actually play in.




















When it was time, we piled back into the colectivo and headed back to Valladolid. We had to check out of the hotel by 1pm, so we started packing up. I noticed that we had made it back in time to catch the 1pm bus rather than the later one we were planning on, so we hurried up and checked out and headed straight to the bus station.

My mom and I had stopped at a bakery after we bought the bus tickets, and we bought a bunch of bread and these pizza-like things filled with cheese and ham, but with a layer of sugar dusted on the top. (The lady at the counter was VERY suprised when I told her "todos!"--all of them! I tried to explain that we were buying for our big family and were not just huge pigs, but I have no idea if she understood what I was trying to say in Spanish.) They looked a bit strange, but they were quite tasty! We ate them on the bus. The bus ride was pretty long--about 2.75 hours. The seats were very comfy, but the ride was pretty bumpy on these smaller back-roads.

We arrived at Playa del Carmen, which is where the ferry to Cozumel leaves from. To my dismay, the bus had taken us to the downtown bus station rather than the one right near the ferry docks, which is where I had thought it would go. So, we hailed three taxis and piled all our luggage in (a man on a tricycle thing tried to convince us to hire him to pedal the luggage over, but we managed to fit it all in the trunks.) We booked it on over to the ferry pier, and I asked if we were too late to buy tickets for the 4pm ferry. (The ferries were only running every 2 hours instead of hourly, due to decreased demand from the swine flu scare). She said, "It leaves in 4 minutes." I said, "okay, can we buy them?" She asked how many, and I said 13. She looked at me like I was crazy. I looked behind me and saw most of my family was still not there yet. "The rest are coming!" I said. She sold them to me, and I frantically motioned my family to hurry up, and we made it onto the ferry barely before they left. We had some trouble finding seats, and a lot of us had to sit by ourselves in random middle seats, but at least we made it!

We were running about 4 hours ahead of schedule at this point! I called the people we rented the villa from while I was on the ferry and explained that we were going to be early. He said we'd have to hail our own taxi since they couldn't be at the pier that fast, but that he would have someone there to let us in.

Once we got off the ferry and found our luggage (which was quite the fiasco--they really need to figure out a more orderly system for luggage collection, but I'll not go into that), we hailed a couple of big taxi vans and headed off to Villa Rosmar.

We were VERY happy to arrive and turn on the A/C and collapse on the couches. The place was beautiful, and we were all tired and starving. Unfortunately, we had scheduled our dinner to be cooked at 9pm that night since we thought we'd arrive so much later, so Michael, Heidi, and I took a cab to the grocery store to pick up some stuff to eat.

Since this post is already ridiculously long, I think I'll talk more about our Villa and the rest of Sat. evening on the next post. Suffice it to say, we made it through our day of adventure! It was pretty exhausting trying to orchestrate the activities for a group of 13--rather more stressful than I had imagined, I'm afraid. Luckily, the rest of the week was all about relaxing and just being together.

Mexico: a reunion--day 1

Prologue: It all started when my very generous little brother got a VERY large bonus at work. Nice guy that he is, he decided what he really wanted to do with part of his bonus was pay for a family trip. Since my family is so spread out, it doesn't happen very often that we all can be together. Matthew decided he wanted us all to be together, and he wanted us to be together someplace exciting and fun.We tossed around various ideas for a while, and finally decided to go to Cozumel, Mexico--a little island off the coast of Mexico, close to Cancun. We liked the idea of renting a beach house and found that it actually didn't cost that much to fly to Mexico--it would cost just as much to fly everyone out to some place in the US. Plus, there'd be reefs and ruins, and lots of exciting things to do.So Matthew enlisted my help as his "travel agent" since he knows I enjoy doing that sort of thing. It was a bit tricky finding a date that everyone could do, but we finally worked it out and booked the trip for the end of May. It would be for a week, and the parents and siblings and their spouses were all invited. Matthew decided that he would not pay for all the kids (there's 11

grandkids in my family so far) but that if the parents wanted to pay for them themselves, that they could do so. Otherwise, it would be just the adults.

I think we booked the tickets back in February or March. The time between then and May went by amazingly fast, and suddenly we were on our way to the Yucatan! Of course, there was the little snaffu about the H1N1 virus that for a time threatened to ruin everything, but in the end, things settled down and we decided to move forward with our plans.

Oh, before I forget, let me state that NONE of the pictures on these blog pages were taken by me. Most of them are my little brother's photos--he's quite the photographer, and we mostly let him take the pictures for us. Some of them come from my mom or sister or other brother. But Kevin and I actually never pulled our camera out once on the whole trip--can you believe that? It was actually really nice to have a designated photographer to rely on to capture all the memories. I wish we had him around all the time to do that!

Chapter 1: Getting There

So, we left on a Friday. We decided to have everyone fly into Cancun, and from there we would travel to see Chichen Itza before we finally ended up at the beach house in Cozumel. Everyone's planes arrived at slightly different times, but there were basically two groups: Matthew, Kevin, and me first and then everyone else arriving like 3-4 hours later. So, the plan was for the first

group to go ahead and take the 2 hour bus ride to Valladolid (where we were staying the first night) and check into the hotel, where we would wait for everyone else. The second group was

going to take a later bus together and arrive in the early evening. In total, there would be 11 adults and 2 children (my older brother Michael and his wife decided to pay for their two little girls to come too.)

Kevin and I flew out of Chicago (about a 3 hour drive away). We didn't really want to have to drive ourselves up there and pay for parking, plus our flight left pretty early and we didn't want to have to leave at 3am from Champaign, so we opted to take the Megabus to Chicago Thursday evening and spend the night at a hotel close to the airport that night. (I booked an AWESOME high-end, modern hotel on Priceline for just $40 plus tax! I love priceline for hotels.) The Megabus was cheap too--just $10 per seat for the ride to Chicago. It was my first time riding the Megabus (those of you who live in the West probably have never heard of them--their routes are in the east and Midwest only), and I was very excited to try them out. In the end, we actually didn't enjoy the Megabus ride, however. The bus was CROWDED and we barely found two seats together--actually, we only got them because of a nice nun sitting next to us who I'm pretty sure asked some other passengers to shift themselves around to leave two open seats together. The other passengers around us were very loud and, well, they smelled (not the nu

n, though--she was nice). So the ride was less than pleasant, although the passengers got quieter as the trip went on. But, on the bright side, the bus did have wireless internet access.

Anyways, back to the Mexico part. Our flight into Mexico was really pretty short--just 3.5 hours (direct flight!). And from Chicago, the price of the tickets was less than $300, so it really was cheaper and shorter than it usually is to fly home to NM! We arrived at the airport, found Matthew, and took a short bus trip to the city center where we bought our bus tickets to

Valladolid. The first thing we noticed was that it was HOT! Not that we didn't expect that, of course. The second thing we noticed was that they charge you to use public bathrooms--just a few pesos, though, which is like 25 cents or something. Before we got our tickets, a man came up to me and started explaining that there was a bus about to leave for Valladolid and that if I came with him, I could buy a ticket right now. I looked at the schedule board, and said I didn't see that time up there. He said, "No, no--there is a bus leaving right now. Hurry! I'll take you to buy a ticket." At this point I finally cottoned on that he was lying and trying some sort of swindle-ry.

Kevin and Matthew made fun of me for taking so long to figure out that I should have just

ignored him. I noted that neither of them was anxious to jump in to help me, however...

The bus ride was uneventful and quite comfortable, actually--the buses (which were "first class" buses) were really a lot nicer than most US buses. We were taking the bus to Valladolid because that is the closest city to the Chichen Itza ruins, which were going to see the next day. (More on that later.) Unlike Cancun and Cozumel, Valladolid is NOT a tourist town--it's just a quiet colonial city with lots of native Mayans and very few English speakers.

We had to walk about a block or two from the bus station to the hotel. It was really interesting to see the "real" Mexico--as opposed to the glammed up tourist areas where we spent mos

t of the trip. The side walks were in pretty bad shape, so it was a bit of an adventure wheeling our luggage to the hotel. Matthew had never been out of the country before, and he was rather shocked by the whole place. He kept saying, "it looks like we're in Afganistan or something! This is like, a third world country!" I told him, well yes, it IS a third world country. But I guess it is actually second world. I never felt unsafe or anything there, but it was certainly an adjustment coming from the US.

The hotel we stayed in looked like a dump on the outside, but as soon as you entered, there was this lovely open air lobby and courtyard. I got to try out my pathetic Spanish skills, and managed to communicate all the necessary things to the lady at the desk. The rooms were pretty basic, but nice enough. We had reserved 5 rooms, all of which were identical except for the one room which would have the 2 kids in it. That room had some bright orange, VERY worn blankets on the beds. The other rooms all had rather standard-looking hotel bedspreads and curtains.

We immediately turned on the AC and tried to cool down. I was planning on venturing out and seeing some of the things in the city before the

rest of the group arrived, but as it turned out, we had to deal with a little problem: my oldest brother John and his wife had missed their first flight! That meant they had missed their connection, and wouldn't get into Cancun until quite late. So, we had to figure out what they were going to do. The last first class bus left from Cancun before they would arrive. Luckily,

the hotel had internet access in the lobby (I'm told it was even quite fast even), so we looked up the bus schedules and figured out the options. We told them they could stay the night in Cancun and take a bus REALLy early in the morning, or they could take a late night, 2nd class bus. They chose the latter, which meant that their bus ride was 3.5 hours long instead of 2, and that they shared the bus with chickens and lots of passengers standing in the aisles. They finally arrived to Valladolid at about 3am.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At about 7ish the rest of the family arrived. They had a little excitement right when the bus was pulling into the station. My little niece Anna had a MAJOR, MAJOR diaper blowout all over her mom's lap and the seat and...well, you get the idea. They cleaned it up the best they could, but ended up paying the bus driver some money to cover the, uh, damages. So they were rather frazzled upon arrival, but they made it! Everyone got settled in their rooms, and then we walked to a restaurant on the plaza for dinner. It was a really nice place with great ambiance-- a fountain in the middle of the room, etc.-- and great food. AND great prices (the benefits of NOT being a tourist area!)

After dinner, we all went to bed early, since we would be leaving early the next morning on the first colectivo shuttle to Chichen Itza. I was the lucky one who got to meet John and Sonya when they arrived at 3am and give them their key,

but I was glad to know that they did make it.

So, it was a long day, and this was a long post! The rest of them will be shorter, I guarantee.

Home again, home again

Well, we're finally back home again--for good this time--after spending a week in Mexico, a week back home, and then two weeks in Ireland! We had some amazing trips, but it's good to be home. We had a sad homecoming gift, though--when we arrived home, we found our car all bashed in on the side! I guess there was a hit and run accident while we were gone. We filed the police report, but we want to find out how much it will cost to fix before we claim it on our insurance. (We have a fairly high deductible, so it may or may not be better to just pay for it ourselves.) It's a little depressing to think that people would do that much damage to your car and then just take off. I'm glad I don't have to live with that on *my* conscience! P.S. I'll be working on blog posts for our trips in the upcoming days--but no promises on how long it's going to take to finish!