Houston to Cancun

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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, particularly around the Galleria to find someplace for dinner and eventually came upon a little Italian restaurant. The owner and chef was from Italy and the food was spectacular. I’m not usually a fan of tomato based sauces at restaurants, but got the spinach gnocchi in a light tomato sauce and was in food heaven. We called it a night around 9 p.m. Marie goes to bed early and we were tired and ready to get packed up and out of Houston. It had gotten really cold on Monday and Tuesday was no better. It was grey, foggy and chilly the better part of the time we were there.

We left for Cancun on Wednesday morning. Our flight was on time leaving Houston and our connection was Mexico City airport (flying on Aero Mexico). The flight itself was fine, though this was the first time I’d been on an Embraer 190 - a slightly smaller version of the 737. It was a little bumpy, especially coming into Mexico City. By the time we were on our initial descent, we could see the brown cloud hovering over Mexico City. The city itself is huge - houses and buildings and roads everywhere. The airplane banked sharply coming in, so the landing itself was a combination of sharp turn headed straight down which was unnerving. We landed without a problem, and headed into the airport. First, we had to negotiate passport control - which was relatively clearly marked and easy to get through. Then was the customs area; however, right now, Mexico does not offload luggage for passengers coming through the US for customs check for flights that connect (they will start doing so next year, and already require it for passengers from Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, etc.). Still, Clay and I were concerned about our luggage getting lost in Mexico City. We stumbled around a bit with the language - Clay has a really good grasp on Spanish, much more so than I do, so we figured we were probably safe to go on into the airport. Of course, for international arrivals in many cities, arriving puts passengers outside the secure area in the airport, so we had to go through security in Mexico City, which was not a big deal. By the time we were in the airport, though, not having ever stepped outside, the pollution started to get to me almost immediately. I started to get a headache, felt like I couldn’t breath and my eyes stung. And there was nothing we could do about it. We wandered around the terminal for a bit to see what was there, ended up at Starbucks (because there are 2 Starbucks in the Mexico City Airport!!!!), and I decided to brave a cheese sandwich. I say brave, as one of the cheeses (a goat cheese - I know that much) had a strange black dusting of something around the outside. Given that each sandwich had the same thing and they had been made freshly the day before, I assumed it was a safe bet it wasn’t mold and with cheese - who can tell? I ate some of it and though the taste was pretty good, the texture was weird - very ash like on the outside. By this point, I just wanted to curl up and cry from the pollution. Clayton ended up being fortunate as far as the pollution went, as he has his asthma inhaler (which he had to use the minute we got off the plane) and is taking Claritan. I’ve never had such awful problems breathing and can’t imagine living there, much less visiting. The sky outside was literally brown with smog. Unfortunately, we had two hours between flights and then the flight to Cancun was delayed for another hour, so three hours total in the airport. I have never been so happy for recycled airplane air!

The trip to Cancun was relatively uneventful. The plane was a 737 and I think they must squeeze in an extra row or two of seats because we had less leg room than on other flights we’ve taken. The strangest part was watching (surreptitiously, of course) the drama between the passenger seated next to me on the aisle and the man seated across from her. Apparently, they were having some kind of domestic issues, as for most of the plane ride, they kept slapping at each other (literally - sometimes with their hands and sometimes with the book she was reading). Then, about half an hour or so before we landed, she started crying, very, very quietly. The only way I could tell, really, was that she kept wiping her eyes with a tissue and trying very hard not to make eye contact with us. About half way through this, he kept leaning across the aisle and trying to comfort her. It was very, very strange.

Cancun airport is a small one. We got our luggage with out incident, headed to the counter for our transportation, which I had arranged in advance. Things were going pretty well, until some strange man came along and got a hold of Clay’s luggage. We had a re-hash of the airport in Rome, with me refusing to give up my luggage, and Clay just following along with the person who had his. The guys from the transportation desk eventually caught up with us all and wrested the luggage away from the strange man, who eventually slunk off. We got ourselves and our luggage to the right car and after fifteen minutes of the driver trying to figure out where he was taking us (there are two hotels in the Cancun hotel district that have essentially the same name, causing endless confusion apparently) we were off. We made it to our hotel, the Aqua Cancun, around 9 p.m. We were both really tired by then and the first order of business after checking in was to get food. The restaurant at the Aqua stays open until 11:30, and by the time we got settled and got there, it was getting fairly late and we were the only couple in the restaurant, which meant we got really ridiculously attentive service from the appetizer all the way through to dessert. No matter - the food was amazing - I had a grilled sole fillet with quinoa and beets and Clay chicken gnocchi.

The Aqua Cancun is toward the end of the hotel strip in Cancun. We were on the eighth floor and had a full ocean view, as well as a full view of the multiple pools. It was really a stunning hotel with a wonderfully soft king size bed, which was a great luxury after four days at the Best Western in Willis, TX. We left the doors to the balcony open all night long to enjoy the ocean breeze and the ocean noise. We headed down to the beach after dinner, of course. The moon was half-full and bright over the inky black ocean.

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