Cancun 2014

This is long.  Beware.

Before Christmas, I had an awesome idea.  I thought it would be so fun to surprise Parker with a little getaway to Cancun!  His cousin and her husband had been during the summer and their pictures looked absolutely incredible.  And so I arranged with my parents to come stay with Ruby for a week (their incredibly generous gift to us) and I started planning.  A tiny bit.

I started worrying about Parker’s work schedule and causing him stress by whisking him away, so I ended up telling him about it.  Fortunately he was totally stoked, for lack of a better word.

Originally we were thinking we would go in March or April, but our baby doctor informed me he did not want me flying out of the country then so we went as late as he thought was wise and turned our Christmas present into a Valentines celebration and a Babymoon!  We also realize that when our five year anniversary comes this summer, we will have a very new baby that we cannot leave overnight.  And so, since we always thought we would go somewhere cool for our five year anniversary, we decided to make this count for that, too.   Perhaps on our actual anniversary we’ll just go somewhere nearby for the night and taking our newborn baby boy with us…

Leaving Ruby was hard.  Way hard.  I might have cried a bit at the airport after my parents drove off with her.  It didn’t help that Ruby was crying, too.  But my mom assured me she stopped pretty quickly and every single time we talked to her on FaceTime (usually every morning and night.  This was my first time leaving my baby girl.  I feel totally comfortable being that mom) she was happy and giving us great big kisses and “bones” and waves.  Truthfully, although we missed her, we didn’t worry about her at all.  More on Ruby’s fun filled week to come.

This post, though, is all about Parker and me.  And our Cancun experience.  We had such a wonderful time!

Day 1

Pretty much was just spent traveling.  Our flight was slightly delayed as it had snowed in Dallas that morning, but we didn’t think twice about it.  A delayed flight without a baby is no sweat at all!  Mexico driving only terrified us a little bit and our resort was gorgeous.  We were ready for sunshine!

Day 2

We spent this day getting to know our all-inclusive resort.  A new experience for us! We loved hanging out on the beach most of the day, drinking all sorts of fancy non-alcoholic drinks (okay, mostly just Miami Vices) and highlight of the day- indulging ourselves with an incredible couples massage.  Truthfully, they were softer on me than I wanted—I think because of the whole pregnant thing—but it was still one of our favorite things.  We also got to watch this not so amazing fire dancing show from our balcony that night.  Maybe we just had super high expectations after seeing the World Fire Dancing championship in Hawaii two years ago…

Day 3

Isla Mujeres day.  I’ll admit it.  Getting to this island without knowing Spanish very well stressed me out a little bit.  I felt like we were getting tricked everywhere we went.  And maybe we did, who knows?  But at the end of the day, we enjoyed it.  We took a ferry across the ocean to this little island where we rented a golf cart to drive around.  Most epic.  Our resort had a sister resort there where we could go hang out for free and eat whatever we wanted.  And so we did.  We enjoyed a different view of the ocean (and some incredible guacamole!) for a couple hours and then cruised around the island in our golf cart.  Seriously awesome.  We came across a sign that said “Mayan Temple” so we went to see it, but realized we’d have to pay to get in so took a picture from the distance and called it good.  We already had Mayan Ruins on our itinerary coming up anyway. It was super interesting to see these beautiful great big houses right next to the slightly better than cardboard ones… We also went into some of the shops but had ran out of cash (remember how I felt like I was getting tricked earlier in the day) so we didn’t buy anything.  But for the sake of fun and because it’s what the vendors like to do, they still tried to get us to buy things saying we could use our credit cards (never mind the exchange fees we’d have to pay with that) so I did indulge in a bit of bargaining.  I really like that.  I always feel so awesome to get the price down.  Wish we could do that more at home!  Getting back to the hotel was a bit of an adventure.  Like I said, we were out of cash and just hoped that the bus ticket we bought earlier in the day would take us back.  Though, truth be told, we weren’t hopeful.  And, unfortunately for us, it was only a one-way ticket.  But we told the bus driver we had “no dinero” (as I rubbed my poor pregnant belly) and he let us on anyway!  Phew!  Lucked out on that one!

Just trying to capture our true emotions about our travels that day...

24 Weeks

The Mayan Temple and some cool artwork

Day 4

My personal favorite day.  We slept in!  I kept waking up early the other days- a side affect of being trained to wake up to for a couple years and the fact that the sun would rise right outside our balcony and the light would brighten our room.  But after a couple days, we adjusted and truly slept in.  Soooo nice!  And then we literally spent all day on the beach.  And we got totally fried.  Well, not totally, but enough that we went to buy aloe vera which was incredibly over priced.  Parker and I don’t do the “do nothing” days very often, but it was super nice this day…

Day 5

We totally got pulled into the tourist trap this day.  We had resort credit and so decided to go see Chichen Itza (more affectionately called “Chicken Pizza” by Parker).  This literally took all. day. long.  Which would have been cool if we were at the ruins all day, but we were only there for like two hours.  As we were driving there (2.5-3 hours away from our resort on a tour bus-group 1) we stopped at this local village for lunch.  Which really was just a market for them to try and make us buy more things.  Parker and I didn’t bring money this day either so we just sort of hung out, looking at everything until they’d finally let us eat.  We also had a few sales pitches on the bus.  While we were driving.  Nothing we could do to escape.

But Chichen Itza was very cool.  It is one of the new seven wonders of the world (apparently they re-did this list sometime during the last decade?) and it was cool to hear some of the history behind it.  Chichen Itza actually isn’t the temple itself- it’s where all the sacrifices and offerings were thrown back in the day.  The temple people picture is a temple dedicated to Kukuclan- the rattlesnake.  There are all sorts of symbolic things all over the temple that were pointed out to us.  We also really liked seeing the building where they literally performed human sacrifices and hearing how they did it.  Which I know sounds gruesome, but since it is something we could not even fathom doing, it is also interesting.  We were told that people used to believe they only sacrificed girls ages 13-15, but upon discovering bodies, realized that they sacrificed about everyone- women, men, children, even babies.  We also liked seeing the ball court.  I honestly do not know how anyone ever got any thing through those “hoops” ever.  Parker and I were a little unclear on whether it was the winner or loser who was killed, but our tour guide told us that they don’t really know and that there is mixed information available.  They only know that the captain from one of the teams had his head cut off after the match.  They also believed that the winner of the game got a straight shot ticket to heaven.  At least according to our tour. 

The triangles on the left are supposed to look like the back of a rattlesnake

Iguanas everywhere!

Day 6

Our final day.  We finally woke up early enough to watch the sun rise.  These pictures don’t begin to do it justice.  It was really beautiful to watch the red skip across the ocean.  Since the ocean had been our favorite, we made time to go hang out for a few more hours before we had to shower and check out.   After lunch, our bus back to the airport came and we made the trek home. 

Although we joke about missing the beach and I have teased Parker every day he has gone back to work since we got back (please just stay…) it really was the perfect little getaway and the perfect amount of time.  We were so excited to see Ruby again and felt so lucky to have the time alone together.