So at the beginning of this month my wife and I took a long overdue vacation down to the Mayan Riviera. This would be our second trip down there (the first when we got married). We went to a different resort this time, about 90 minutes from Cancun and it was awesome, and absolutely huge! It was a 5-hotel complex and we were staying at The Palace. It ended up being a great week - lots of food (too much as evidenced by the nice rebound I experienced), lots of sun and lots of naps. That's about as good as a vacation gets for me.

I'm really not much of a site seer or a tourist. The Mayan Riviera has some great attractions, one of the most notable being Chichen Iza and the Mayan Pyramids. There's a ton of history there that'd on the one hand be really neat to see, but on the other hand it's generally a good 3-hr bus ride ... each way! Spending 6 hours on a bus on vacation when I'm only there for a week is not my idea of fun. Instead we opted for more sun, more food, more swimming and more naps.



The extent of my tourism was a 30-minute bus ride into Playa Del Carmen (another couple that we knew was down as well). We were basically allocated 3 hours to stop, barter, shop and barter some more. We were bored after an hour - fortunately for me, Laura doesn't enjoy mindless shopping. We ended up sitting down on 5th Avenue (that's the main shopping strip) and just 'people watching' - always entertaining. Our friends however, well, it wasn't enough time and they went back on their own for more shopping another day.




My plan, as I'd been dieting for a couple months was just to ease up, eat what I want (a loose maintenance week of sorts, which turned out to be far from maintenance of course) and take a week off the weights. I ended up hitting the hotel gym for two easy workouts (rationalized it by telling myself I was positively affecting the partitioning of the breakfast buffet that I hammered every day). I actually went down weighing about 220 and a few days into the trip I was 232.5!!!! LOL Yeah! For the first few days all the food seemed to go into the right places as I just got fuller and fuller ... and then it started going lower (ie. stomach) and I started getting fatter and fatter. :( In the end I'm sitting around 228 and now have to work to get it all back off. BUT it was worth it.

I had also planned to do a little work every day so as not to fall too behind. Such was not the case as there was no in-room wireless and I didn't feel like paying $25/day for 30-60 minutes work. That probably proved to be a good thing as well as it afforded me a nice break from work. Coming back to piles of it was still worth it. I'm blessed with some great (and obviously patient) clients.

So, I did a lot of this



Here's a shot of the girls shopping. Lots of silver in Mexico. Why do women always look happy around jewelry? There's a lesson in there somewhere.



Here's a couple shots of the beach.




The second last night we went to eat at one of the speciality restaurants - Brazilian. They started us off with a salad bar, and then we received this



Note how little is on the plate - that's one forkful of mashed potatoes, some cooked spinach, a piece of corn on the cob, an onion and a slice of tomato. But from there they started to bring out seven different meats - each on a long sword. So the sword was full of cooked meat, and they'd slide a piece off for you. The meats included sausage, chicken, turkey, pork tenderloin, beef, veal and .... the one we were warned about (and subsequently didn't eat), blood sausage. And then coconut ice cream for dessert.

And here's a shot of us on our last night.



And now it's back to business. Thanks for reading.
Erik

Posted Apr 15, 2008 by Erik Ledin.
This entry is filed under Off Topic.