Liam goes to Mexico

This post has been a long time coming, even longer than I anticipated it would take me. My original plan was to blog about this trip while it was ongoing but obviously that didn’t happen – more on why that didn’t occur later. Anyways, Dave pointed out to me today that I’ve managed to go an entire month without posting anything so I figured it was either now or never for this post. So here goes…

Way back near the beginning of February the Keans and us decided to take a last minute trip to a sunny destination, in hopes of getting in some solid relaxation. This would also be Liam’s first international trip and after Amy went through the trouble of getting Liam’s passport, there was pretty much no way we weren’t going somewhere. We searched online for some deals and eventually got a tip from a friend of Amy’s about a resort in the Mayan Riviera in Mexico. The name of the resort was the Occidental Grand Flamenco Xcaret and one of the bonus’ of the resort was one day free admission to the ecological park, Xcaret Park, located right next door. The deal we found, which was pretty good I think ($1200 / person), had us flying out of / into Montreal instead of Ottawa. While I didn’t love the idea of having to drive to / from CYUL, it saved us $200 each so we lived with it.

The trip down went pretty smooth, neither David nor Liam seemed to mind the flight. When we landed in Cancun, it was pouring rain and JK mentioned that he had checked the weather before we left and said it called for rain every day we were there. I was on vacation – I wasn’t too concerned about the rain. After waiting a long time for our bags to get unloaded from the plane (seems they didn’t like to work in the rain at this airport) we eventually found our ride to the resort. Our ride was actually a 10 passenger van which had to make stops at two or three other resorts on the way to our resort. A bit annoying but whatever…we arrived in one piece which is all that matters. On the drive, the closer we got to our resort – the nicer the weather became. By the time we got there, it was a beautiful sunny day. So much for the weather forecasts JK had seen – thankfully.

Our first night at the resort was very uneventful, in fact we all went to bed very early because we were so tired from travelling. We woke up the next morning feeling somewhat refreshed though so it was probably a good idea. After changing rooms (hoping to get rooms that were side-by-side) we did a little exploring of the resort. Along the way, we spotted many iguanas, including the guy you see to the right, and I think I took pictures of most of them. :)

The resort itself was quite nice, and seemed to be fairly family friendly. There were lots of other families with young kids / babies around which made things less stressful for us. It’s nice to not be the only table with fussing kids at meal times. There were ramps and / or elevators so that you could get where you needed to go with a stroller, although some of the paths were quite rough. In the end though, the rough paths were usually a Godsend since they had the effect of putting Liam to sleep. The food was ok – certainly not ultra impressive but it was edible for the most part. I got a kick out of the different theme nights at the buffet, I joked that it seemed like all they did was change the decorations and always served the same food. As for the booze – it was mostly available when you wanted it. The only exception to that was in the evening, if you were in your room (like we were after the kids went to sleep), the closest bar was back up at the lobby, about a 10 minute walk. There were mini-bars in the rooms, but they were only stocked with 2 beers and were only replenished every other day so…

One of the interesting features of this resort was the man made bay or cove that they created for use as their beach. It wasn’t very large, maybe 200-300 feet across at the widest point, but it was filled with all sorts of fish and other sea life. It was a great place to do some snorkeling (wish I had remembered my fins, snorkel and mask) but even without getting into the water you could see lots of fish, turtles and other sea life – JK even saw a sting ray one morning. We only ended up spending one day down at the beach. We snagged one of the ‘floating beds’ that were available and hung out for the day. The other days we spent up at the pool close to our rooms.

So I had mentioned that I was planning to blog while I was actually on vacation but that it didn’t happen. I even brought along a laptop with me so that I could offload the pictures from my camera and upload them to Flickr as we went along. The reason this never happened is actually two fold: first off, there really wasn’t that much to blog about, I mean we didn’t do a whole hell of a lot each day. We got up, went and had breakfast, then went for a swim. Eventually it was time for lunch, followed by an afternoon nap for the kids and then before you knew it, supper time had rolled around. After supper the kids went to bed and we got out the crosscrib board. After the game it was off to bed. Not terribly exiciting stuff to write about day after day. The other reason I didn’t go any blogging or uploading of photos while I was down there was the cost. It was $15 US for 60 minutes of internet time. If I could have used that 60 minutes over the course of the week, that wouldn’t have been so bad, but you had to use your 60 minutes within 24 hours of purchasing them. Not a good deal at all, at least not in my mind. For those two reason I opted to wait until we got back to do any blogging / uploading of photos. There was a bonus to bringing the laptop though, it meant I got to take a lot more movies than I would have been able to if I didn’t have the laptop to download them to. We also got to see a slideshow of each days photos before the crosscrib game began.

One of the highlights of the trip was the day we spent in Xcaret Park. I believe the park has been described as Mexico’s Disneyland or something along those lines. It was definitely a cool place and had we known, I think we may have paid the extra to get a second day of admission to the park. There was lots to see in the park, animals, shows, and even some history. You could swim with dolphins or float down an underground river. At the end of each day there is a live show that tells the story of the Mayans and showcases some of their unique games and dances. One of their games involved a flaming ball and seemed to be vaguely similar to field hockey. Unfortunately Liam didn’t appreciate the loud drums during the show so we had to bow out early but I was happy to have seen as much as I did.

By the end of the week I was certainly ready to go home. Not to say that I didn’t have a good time, but the vacation didn’t end up being quite as relaxing as I’d hoped it would be. To top it all off, as we were flying home, we were told that there was some ‘light snow’ in the Montreal area. Light snow my ass, it was a full on storm that we had to drive through to get back to Ottawa. Once again we vowed never to fly out of Montreal again – a vow we’d made at least a couple of times in the past. :)

Photos from the trip can be found on our Flickr site – here. A whole bunch of the photos are marked as private to friends and family so unless you’re signed in and marked as a friend, you wont see them.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention – the Haggertys won the first international crosscrib tourney, narrowly beating the Keans for the title. Looking forward to future tourneys…