Mexico!

So much to talk about for the week, but I'll try to hit the highlights.

We left by limo at 4 a.m. on Sunday. Did you know that limos are 30% more before 4 a.m.? Flight was at 6 and we made it to O'Hare in about 20-25 minutes. The limo was actually 10 minutes early, so we were all good (he didn't charge us more).

Arrived at the NEW Cancun airport: air conditioned, more booths to check your passport, just a much smoother, nicer process. Two hours after landing we were at the hotel, the Gran Bahia Principie in Akumal (about 75 minutes south of Cancun).



Here's our villa. We were on the second floor on the right end. We agreed that it's the best villa on the nearly mile long resort grounds. Though there isn't a beach right outside our villa, there is the ocean. I think they ended the property here because the beach becomes large rocks, which of course means no tourists! Nice. It's very quiet and away from the main pool areas.







Our room from the porch looking in. You can see our towel origami, a new one of which was presented every day.

















The rocky area outside our room. See those waves? It was pretty windy most of the trip while right at the beach. They made nice background noise for sleeping!
















Here's the view out our porch. Notice the lack of people? Eggscellent.
















Part of the actual beach where we would sit when not at the pool.














Typically we would get down to breakfast by around 9:30 or so. Often we didn't eat lunch, but would still have dinner at a relatively normal time somewhere between 6:30 and 9. Part of the reason for no lunch is the amount of food we would eat at breakfast and then we'd be sitting around the pool have mojito's or something all afternoon. Still, I went to an all inclusive for a week and lost 4 pounds. Very odd. And I drank LOTS of water.

On Tuesday night, after two days just like the above description, we had dinner and decided to do some tequila shots.





Outside of the restaurants are seven bottles of flavored tequilas with salt, limes and shoot glasses. So we tried three flavors: strawberry, lemon and coconut, by doing just half shots of each. Unfortunately, that led to my worst bout of heartburn in the last two weeks. I barely slept at all on Tuesday night and that led into me feeling bad on Wednesday.







After breakfast on Wednesday, I headed back to the room for a nap and LL went down to the pool. Unfortunately, I was not just tired, but about to be sick too. A fever hit me hard and fast, a symptom of the H1N1 as I've recently discovered, so there I was under the covers with socks, sweat pants and two shirts on when LL came to check on me. That night, my fever broke and the Thursday I felt pretty good, but we took it easy anyway. Friday and Saturday I was back snorkeling: Friday in a cave and Saturday in mixed water lagoon where fresh and salt water met.




This is the dining room we ate in most of the time, or at least the ceiling of it.











This is one of the restaurants we ate in at night. There are three buffets, a 24 hour snack bar and at least 6 restaurants to choose from every day.













One of the lit up lobby areas. There are three of them which are all about this size. Below are the other two with LL in the pictures.




































These fellas were a common sight, including one that would visit the pool area and scared the bejesus out of LL. In fact, this guy isn't far from the pool.