Sat March 13 & Sun 14 2010. Weekends are the busy times here in Cancun. A Typical vacation starts and stops on Saturdays, so those days find the most traffic, crowds, confusion, and partiers. All four of those found their way into our lives over the past two days. On Sunday Laurie gave herself her Humiera shot, which is a new drug therapy for her to help with her Crohn’s Disease. It has some minor side effects, but just the injection itself is pretty intense. She has to find a suitable injection site – this time it was in the back of her upper thigh. She quickly started a low grade fever, but that is somewhat normal.
We hung around the condo for the past two days, watching the world go by and enjoying the beautiful weather. It is what I describe as “Chamber of Commerce” weather, for it is the absolute perfect conditions that the local tourism authority and politicos know will draw great crowds of visitors. The days started out in the low 70’s and never got out of the 80’s and not a cloud in the sky and with light breezes. How could it get any better?
I am on my 2nd book of the trip, The Memory Collector, by Meg Gardiner. I just finished The Dirty Secrets Club by the same author on Saturday. Meg Gardiner is a mystery writer, in the Michael Crichton vein; I discovered her books while reading a Stephyen King article in Entertainment Weekly – he found Ms. Gardiner’s Evan Delancy series to be a great read, and I bought the set of five books for our trip to Solymar two years ago. DSC and Memory Collector introduce a new character, Jo Beckett, a forensic physchologist. She comes in after a “life ending event” – maybe a murder, maybe a suicide? And works to unearth what the state of mind of the deceased was and tries to unearth the truth from that angle – very interesting. I highly recommend her books if you are looking for a engrossing book(s) to read! But be sure you have some time to devote to reading (like on a vacation!) for you will not want to put them down. One thing for sure, sometime before next summer I will invest in a Kindle or similar, as lugging over 10lbs of books around is no fun – I have the new Stephen King book to read during this trip, “Under the Dome” – it alone is several inches thick! I did bring two paperbacks, but it seems that all of the most interesting books aren’t out in paperback yet (or so the marketers would have you belive!)
OK, back to the vacation. Saturday found us just lazying around here, enjoying the beautiful weather and the peace and quiet. We are enjoying so just ‘wtaching the world go by’- there are cruise ships passing by on their way to Cozumel, vendors roaming up and down the beach selling items (constantly, it seems) and and entire generation of different kinds of people all with different plans and agendas, hopes and dreams, some on schedules and some not, young and old, working and relaxing – it is amazing just to sit and watch.
Our condo is on the 2nd floor, which means there are really three levels below us. Solymar is built on an interesting floor plan – the two hallways have three accessways to the rooms. As an example (look at my pics for more info), from Level 1 you see several doorways. On the left there are doors that lead to rooms overlooking the ocean. On the right there are doors to rooms overlooking the lagoon (much cheaper), but there are also stairways. Some of the stairways go up, others go down. So from Level 1 you can access rooms on the ‘ground floor’, rooms on that level, or you can access rooms on the next level (but that is not Level2). If you were to take the elevator (or stairs, lots of stairs) to Level 2, you would find similar access – there are rooms on Level 2, there are stairs leading down to rooms below (which would be ‘above’ the ‘up stairs’ rooms on Level 1) and stairs leading up to rooms above Level 2 (which are the penthouse rooms). So if you are standing at the beach and look back at Solymar, you see there are six floors of rooms, but if you come into Solymar you only find 2 hallways. Very Efficient.
From our room, 2407, we have a great view of everything. We can see the pool, the restaurant and the beach. The sun angle is great in this room as there is just a few early hours of direct sun – which is a good thing, for after a few minutes you can get quite sunburned. Below us on the ground level are some college-age young men, and they have ‘the best spot’ in the complex – direct access to the pool, a nice patio with chairs (and a bathroom), which makes their room ‘party central’. Laurie and I have had a great time watching people come and go with this group. At times the crowd of young people at the pool can exceed 30 – the girls are not paying any attention to the guys, the guys are acting like typical college guys trying to get the girls to notice them, there is a lot of alcohol involved – even drinking before 9am! – and it seems that the world is in a good place – there will be this kind of interplay for generations to come, now and forever. There are families with young kids that play around the perimeter of the action – the pool to the left of our view is a very shallow “kiddie pool” – we are having fun watching the kids play and the parents and grandparents concentrate on them while also watching (staring?) at the college kids and maybe remembering times back when they were part of that group….
The Solymar “entertainment staff” cranks the music up early to get everyone’s blood moving around – but this is not The Oasis or The Rui Palace, though they try very much to be. They drag a volleyball net across the pool occasssionally and try to get the crowd involved, the poolside bar is constantly busy with imbibers, The beach has just been ‘rejuvenated’, the Cancun Association brought in barges to pump sand back up to the beaches which was washed away by the active hurricane season they had last year. But as oceans can do, Mother Nature is busy moving all of that sand back where she wanted it to be in the first place – you can see in some of my pictures the dramatic dropoff at the oceans edge – with each wave, more and more of that sand is working its way back into the ocean – right where it was intended to be. But for as long as man has assets on the beach, he will fight for the right to exploit The Beach, and Mother Nature will fight back just as hard and quite relentlessly to set things back the way she intentended. Such is the cycle of life.
Laurie and I tend to just eat one meal a day here – we used to say it wsa because of the heat, but in March it is just not that hot… anyway, on Saturday we went to The Shrimp Bucket – Laurie had a 1/2 lb of the Peel-and-Eat shrimp – they were the size of your finger and quite tasty. I had the Scallop and Shrimp skewers, and they too were quite tasty and pretty much exactly as described – scallops and shrimp on skewers (kabobs). I had cole-slaw as well. The Shrimp Bucket is lagoon side, and we got to watch the Aqualand Marina customers as they went on their Jungle Cruise excursions, rented JetSkis, or took group rides on the Jet Boat – everyone is looking for a different thrill. Me? I am too old for thrills like that :o)
Sunday was a quiet day, we lounged around Solymar most of the day, Laurie was really feeling the after effects of that Humiera shot. Late yesterday we headed to La Isla mall to find an internet café where Laurie could call back to her mom and Bridgette (our cell phones cost $.99min to call back to the USA!) but the café that used to be at La Isla is not there any more. We went by the new WalMart Superama and got some macaroni salad, chicken, and refried beans and stuff to make grilled cheese sandwiches and headed back to the condo. This new WalMart Superama is out in the middle of nowhere, so we gringos were quite out of place – and not a single person there spoke any English. I was peering into the deli selection and was able to get my ideas across to the deli lady – 2 of this, 4 of that, can you wrap this in cellophane? She offered tastes of things I didn’t recognize (and there were a lot of that), I also got a small container of their seafood mix – it looks like squid, crab, scallops, pico (salsa) – and Kenneth, I found the Rooster Sauce! After a quiet eat-in meal, we relaxed. A quiet day in paradise!
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