Cancun!

We went to Cancun July 1-6, and yet I am only writing about it now because I am a horrible slacker.

Keith asked me to go on vacation with him shortly after we started dating. I was pretty surprised by him asking and nothing less than shocked when he informed me he intended to go to Cancun.

But, I figured it wasn’t every day that someone asked me (or ever) so I said yes. And hoped that he would still like me when the time came. (Not just for vacation reasons, natch.)

So I got a passport (horrible picture by the way, I look SO mad), requested the days off of work and bought a bathing suit for the first time in 10 years.

I was ready. Our flight left Pittsburgh at 6:00AM so we woke up at 3AM to get ready and head to the airport.

I had warned Keith earlier that every flight I had ever taken was delayed by some amount of time, but I guess he cancelled me out because everything left on time. We had a layover in Chicago where Keith dozed on a bench but I was too cold to do anything. Then we had a ~4 hour flight to Cancun.

We got there at about 12:30 or so and had to go through customs and whatnot. Keith had arranged a shuttle service beforehand to get us to the hotel and wow would I ever recommend that. As soon as we stepped outside there were all sorts of taxis and vans trying to get you to use them. It was hella overwhelming, but luckily we just found the guy we needed and hopped in a van.

There were a few other couples in the van with us and we were off, winding our way to the hotel stretch. One of my favorite memories was coming around a bend that gave us our first view of the ocean. In that moment, you could hear everyone’s breath catch in their throats due to the sheer beauty of the water.

The van ride was maybe a half of an hour and it was really neat driving up to all the other hotels dropping people off because we weren’t really sure which one was ours, so it was just a lot of excitement.

Finally we arrived at RIU Palace Las Americas. It was enormous, but not nearly as large as some of the hotels there. It was also blindly white, which worked really well against the blue of the water.

While we checked in a lady came by with some sort of fancy drink for us and I just stood in awe.

Sadly the lobby was too dark during the day and too bright at night to photograph well on my crappy camera, but that was a small part of the ceiling. (The lobby was HUGE).

After we finished checking in, we went up to our room and immediately changed into our bathing suits.

There had been some negative reviews online about the rooms, but I thought it was lovely. I apparently didn’t take any pictures but we had a junior suite with a big bathroom with double sinks, a separate little area with a tv and couch and two beds.

Which was kind of weird. They were two double beds pushed together. Which was odd, but didn’t really matter, except in the middle of the night I’d sometimes end up in the crack.

Before we went out to the beach, we sat down at the Italian place for lunch.

I had shrimp and risotto with squid ink. (I seriously only ordered it for the squid ink part – which didn’t taste like much, just kind of salty.)

And Keith had pizza. Because why not?

Afterwards, we made our way out onto the beach where a man came by every 5 minutes with margaritas for us. It was amazing.

We were in and out of the water a few times and eventually made our way to the pool bar, where someone got a little tipsy. Eventually we were just so exhausted from the 3AM wakeup, the travel, the sun, the water that we headed upstairs for showers and a nap and almost slept through dinner. Good thing the buffet was open til 10!

to be continued…