Here I am, in Cancun, at the hotel Gran Laguna Real or something like that, which I'll review later. I'm sitting in the small bar/restaurant area under a palapa, feet away from the lagoon. The hotel is on the zona hotelera, where all the major hotels are, but on the lagoon side, home of condos, time-shares and lower-quality accommodations. Being on the beach in Cancun might have been fun, but this is quite nice here as well. There is a little breeze which makes the heat (and it's quite hot at 9 AM) bearable, birds that chirp from time to time, and even iguanas and little lizards make their appearance.
Mike and the girls are in the pool, playing. It's a rather small pool, significantly smaller than the one at my mom's town-house complex in LA, but just the perfect size for the girls. Alas, it's very deep for them - 4 1/2 ft at its shallowest - but Mika is swimming quite well. "Swimming" in the broad sense of the word, as in being able to get from side to side of the pool - not as in being able to actually keep a stroke or breathe as she swims. We need to figure out where we can put her in serious swimming classes. I got lifejackets for both of them before leaving, so Camila can hang out all over the pool quite safely (though they, of course, still need adult supervision). I hope their screams and laughter are not bothering other people.
They've loved it here so far. We didn't arrive at the hotel until 8 PM, but they went to the pool immediately. We saw huge bats flying around, one with such a perfect bat shape that it really surprised me. They also saw several geckos and one iguana. They were fascinated. Even the single barracuda-like fish in the lagoon fascinated them. It's amazing, really, how little kids need to have fun.
As for the trip, it's gone both well and bad. The good part was the flight. We got to the airport ridiculously early (miscalculating how long it'd take to get there leaving at 6 AM), but after a trouble-free, line-full check-in we came upon a prize-wheel for United. You spinned (sp?) the wheel and got one of the prizes (18 & over only). Mika spun it for us, wishing to get a bottle of water, and got me day-access to the Red Carpet Club (United's airport lounge) and Mike and upgrade to economy-plus, space depending. Well, as we had kids, they let all of us go into the lounge, and we spent an hour there having a simple breakfast (all they had was bread/toast and dried cereals), reading and coloring. As comfortable as the club would be sans-kids (and they have a relaxation room full of candles, for those who really need relaxing), it does become a bit stressful to make sure they are not too loud and walk rather than skip/run. So after an hour or so we left, in search of our yet-to-be-assigned tickets.
And here came our second surprise: We were all upgraded to economy-plus! The seats were just as narrow, but when you fly with kids there is a lot of extra space on the seats - and there was plenty of legroom. The kids spent the flight sleeping, watching movies in our new, small laptop (from where I'm blogging), coloring and hanging out. I met a very nice woman, Maria, and spent much of the flight talking to her. She's a born again Christian and was interested in my trip from Christianity to atheism, but she was one of those Christians who actually focus in the New Testament. I liked her a lot and the time went away very quickly.
Once we arrived, trouble started as we were scammed time and again by car rental companies. I'll blog about this separately and later, as I'm fuming just thinking about it (because, as the one doing everything, it was totally my fault to fall for the scam). Indeed, our credit card has been put on hold by fraud prevention, so I wonder if they tried to scam us even more than I thought.
I also want to write a separate review of the hotel, which I'll do later as well.
As for now, we need to exchange money, call VISA and get on our way to our next destination.
Remember, you can always e-mail us at yucatan@marga.org