Cancun MX part 2 - Playa Del Carmen

Fri March 12 2010 – today we decided to head south to Playa Del Carmen, since we had the rental car, why not see some new sights? Our first stop was at a new WalMart Superama in the commercial district near the airport to get some sunscreen – the two aerosol bottles we had purchased would not work! Heavens knows how to return them… the Superama was interesting, very small, more like a Publix vs Kroger. After we stocked up, we headed south on MX307 – the main drag that heads south of Cancun. It is as wide as a 4-lane interstate (2-lanes each way), but there are really no road rules – if there is room for 3-wide cars, then there are 3-wide cars! The speed limits are in KPH, and 100KPH seems to be about the maximum.
We traveled through Puerto Morales, past several new large hotel entrances, over several arbitrary speed tables and huge speed ‘bumps’ – all mean, I assume, to slow things to practically a stop for no obvious reason. We arrived in Playa Del Carmen and really had to hunt for a parking spot – one of the perils of having a car in this part of the world. We wandered around this town a bit – it was really just a smaller version of Cancun, as we expected, but it is a major port for ferries that run to Cozumel, visible on the horizon. Cozumel is a major port for cruise ships, and you could see them as well. Hit my flickr page for more pics. The beaches in Playa Del Carmen were pretty, but they were occupied by two major hotels – both looked pretty pricey. We had lunch at a nice eatery – I had shrimp and chicken fajitas and Laurie had chicken tacos – neither of us ate all of our meal, though we did get some table-made guacamole dip which was very, very good. The waiter asked if we wanted it ‘spicy’ – I did, Laurie didn’t :o), so we got it not spicy. We arrived back at Solymar in plenty of time to be able to enjoy the evening, and Laurie was able to get on the net and ‘text’ message her daughter Bridgette. We bought some bootleg DVD’s at Mkt 23 and tried to get them to play – we found out the DVD player didn’t have any cables hooking it to the TV! We’ll have to talk to Michelle about that! Laurie was able to watch one of her movies on my laptop. I awoke this morning to a beautiful moon, pre-sunrise. Check out the flickr page for those pictures – and I found out that Starbucks doesn’t open till 8am on Saturday and Sunday – I saw the “7am Lun-Vic” on their sign, but didn’t recognize the ‘8am Sab-Dom’ meant Sunday AND Saturday! I gotta learn some Spanish.