islanderbookworms

December 22, 2008 Last day here! And we are so glad for it! Clay and I are both totally vacationed out. I am too much of a Type A personality to spend so much time being lazy and he just misses his cat (Carmen). I got nearly to the point of tears this morning when I saw two lovely sweet dogs at Turtle Bay Restaurant - well loved, sweet dogs about Manit’s size - I miss my sweet mutt!!!!!! It’s been a “travel” day. We got up this morning, and though I had every intention of going snorkeling one more time in Akumal Bay, I eventually gave up on it. Clay is sunburned on his back and my shoulders are in a lot pain from all the swimming in the current - not to mention my ... read more

A lazy day! We got up around 8 or so and headed once again over to the Turtle Bay Bakery for breakfast. This has quickly become our favorite food spot here. After, we came back to the hotel, rented fins from the dive shop for snorkeling and did a bit of shopping (the last of it while here, probably). Ever since yesterday, after the tour of the ruins at Tulum, I’ve started to have a different kind of appreciation/respect for the skeletons that are so popular in Mexican iconography. At first, I found them somewhat disturbing and disquieting. But during the tour yesterday, our guide told us that the Mayans traded with other places to get volcanic rocks to use in the desiccation process for corpses. They would bury their family members in the middle of ... read more

Friday, Dec. 19 We were scheduled to go out on a catamaran on a guided tour-fishing-snorkeling thing with the Akumal dive shop today. We got up relatively early (8 a.m.) and headed to the Turtle Bay Bakery and Restaurant. There have been a lot of positive reviews about this place on Trip Advisor and they were entirely right - it is amazing! Good, fresh food - lots of vegetarian options for breakfast. I had a large breakfast burrito with potatoes and egg and Clay had an egg scramble with potatoes and peppers. We went to the dive shop only to find out that the catamaran tour had been cancelled (no reason - just cancelled). We thought about doing a guided snorkeling tour in Akumal Bay but decided to go ahead and just snorkel on our own. ... read more

Cancun to Akumal - Dec. 18 This a.m., we got up at a more or less reasonable time of 8:30 a.m. and headed back to the restaurant area at Aqua. This time, we went to the breakfast restaurant (they have three restaurants - one for each meal). One thing that we noticed was how incredibly empty the place seemed - there were people in the pools in the morning, but only a very few and just a few people on the beach. There was almost no one in the restaurant in the morning and no one in the hallways or on the elevators. More about this in a bit. Breakfast was great - more overly attentive service and good food. I had grapefruit, some sort of fruit/veggie smoothie and an egg-white omelet with spinach and feta ... read more

Houston to Cancun - Dec. 17, 2008 On Tuesday, Clay and Marie and I went to the Galleria. First, however, we stopped off at a gourmet/organic grocery in The Woodlands Mall area. Clay and I stocked up on some of our favorites: pasta imported from Italy, good chocolate, good crackers, etc. We then headed to a UPS shipping store to ship back our goodies to NM, so that we have a care package from us to us waiting when we get home. We spent the better part of the afternoon/evening doing some shopping. Fortunately, Marie and I like all the same shops, so we dragged Clay through Eddie Bauer, L’Occitane, Williams Sonoma, Coldwater Creek and the neatest yoga shop called Lucy. We headed up Westheimer Road, which is where most of the shopping is in Houston, ... read more

Our latest journey takes us to Houston first and then on to Mexico. I don't think I'd normally write much about a city in the US for a travel blog, as I've generally in past focused more on traveling outside the country when I've written about our trips. But Clay and I have decided it might be time to keep better track of our travels, especially since we keep having a conversation that goes like this: "Which airport was it that we spent three hours waiting for our airplane that was stuck in Corpus Christi because of heavy rainfall?" "Was it Cleveland?" "No, couldn't have been." "Atlanta? Houston? Dallas?" We never did figure out which ariport it was and it doesn't matter,of course, but still... So I'm starting with Houston this time. We flew in on ... read more