We enjoyed a fun, child-full, Passover Seder last night down at my parent’s house. Mom prepared an awesome meal, and once again made the best Matzo Ball soup (two versions…one that is chicken based, and one that is vegetable based….my favorite is the veggie). Joel and Jenn ventured out with their two week old son, Gavin, and joined us; and Abby, Teva, and Micah trekked down from NW Denver. It was wonderful to be with family and friends and to be sharing Ezra’s first Passover with those folks.

It was also interesting to see the progression of age: Micah is nearly 2, Ezra is nearly 1, and Gavin is brand new.  Gavin did really well (so did Joel and Jenn), and Micah and Ezra seemed to enjoy playing with each other. With the ‘sudden’ introduction of youth at the Seder table, it did make for an interesting story-telling part of the meal (traditionally this part can take an hour or more)…and we reduced that time down to about 20 minutes. But it did include a poem that Mom and Dad found somewhere: it was a bit silly, yet fitting for our attempted meal.

Photo Note: even though we had several camera’s on hand, almost no photos were taken…probably due to chasing kids down. The bib that Ezra is sporting is Gavin’s and he was actually supposed to wear it, but size and willingness to sit up factored in to who got the photo taken with it on.

The morning started just like all of the rest, except this time, Ezra was determined to prove to us that ‘routine’ is anything but routine. He essentially refused to take his morning nap, forcing us to cancel our AM swim and to focus on getting him some shut-eye. Um, that focus didn’t really pay off until early afternoon….but in the between time, we were able to secure our ride to the airport and schedule our check-out time with the resort.

After lunch and the okay nap, we hit the beach. Since it was our last day in the water, we wanted to make sure that he spent some decent time in the ocean. Again plans were somewhat stymied when on the way into the water, I was pushed against a rock and hurt my foot. Since it was on the way into the water, there was a little pain to deal with, but Ezra and I decided to stay out for a while.

Just as an FYI for anyone coming this direction: there are rocks on the way out to the waves. It seems as though this was the one thing that NOBODY mentioned to us when they talked about Mexico…they told us about the weather, the food, the airport, the people….but not the rocks. They are in plenty and they are everywhere. Sometimes you can see them as you are walking, but as soon as a wave comes by and carries sand with it, everything disappears. The walk can be completed successfully if done with time and balance on your side, but it is made exponentially harder when balance is taken away…ie: carrying a child through crashing waves.

When I got a chance to look at my foot, it was cut in two places and bruised the size of a silver dollar. The saltwater did it’s job and made it hurt really badly for a short amount of time, and now the cuts don’t hurt that much…only the bruise. The real bummer part is that the injury is located exactly where the strap on my flip-flop lands on my foot….therefore making them unavailable. I suppose that it’s good that this happened on the last day, so I don’t have to go closed-toe for too long. Ah, the trials and tribulations of beach going (fyi, this marks the third time that I have drawn blood on a rock in the ocean….and the other two have left scars….once in the Mediterranean, once in the Red Sea, and now in the Gulf).

For dinner we opted out of our reservation at the Japanese restaurant and instead headed for the dinner buffet. We decided on more noise, food at our pace, and the ability to wear shorts. All of it was as planned, and dinner was a much more stress free environment than earlier in the week.

They have a rule here that if you are going to one of the sit-down-and-order restaurants, men have to wear pants, close-toed shoes, and a collared shirt with sleeves (women are left to their own vices). The brochure says that this is ‘to respect all cultures that come to our resort’…but I think it’s a load of junk….because that ‘respect’ doesn’t show up between the hours of 7am and 6pm when people are wearing all sorts of stuff that disrespects all sorts of things. Anyhow, long story longer, we were glad not to be under the oppression of silly rules for dinner.

Some pictures from our final day at the resort (our last day is a travel day, as our ride comes at 9:50am).

Pool, Beach, Pool. It was a good day. The lady who cleans our room even left Ezra a little towel-gift.

Dinner on the other hand…this day brought us to the Italian restaurant called Mama Mia’s. We decided that when we started the meal, we would ask if we could do it in a hurry…apparently, that is all we needed to say any of the other nights. Dinner would probably take someone who is not time constricted by a baby about 1.5 hours. The first two nights exceeded an hour, and exceeded Ezra’s tolerance for sitting in a high chair. Last night: 35 minutes start to finish.

The minestrone was good, and the antipasto was equally as tasty, so we had high expectations for the main course. Ahna ordered spaghetti with vegetables, and I ordered spaghetti with seafood and garlic. In my head, my dish would be noddles, shrimp, clams, and cream sauce. In reality, my dish was noodles, clams, oysters, salad shrimp, red sauce, and tentacles. Lots of tentacles with suction cups. I am pretty certain that there was more than one octopus in the dish, but I never actually counted the number of tentacles to see if they exceeded 8. I decided to eat around them, and enjoy some noodles…which did in fact taste fine and satisfied my hunger.

On the way back to the room, we took some photos of the lay of the land (the last four pictures – and the big one – are of our building):

So it takes a few days to adjust to the idea of a vacation, to learn the lay of the land, and to figure out a good routine for everyone. We searched high and low for two days, but we think that we finally found it yesterday.

And it’s everything that it was cracked up to be: breakfast, nap, pool, lunch, nap, beach, pool, dinner, bed. Most of the napping is done by Ezra, although there are moments that we shut our eyes also. We have been taking that time to play on the computer, read a book, or do a kakuro puzzle. I think that if you look closely, what was described in the first part of this paragraph is what is often referred to as a “vacation.”

Last night’s dinner brought us to the Swiss cuisine: fondue. For several reasons, we enjoyed the dinner a lot more than the previous night….first of all, this restaurant is on ‘our’ end of the complex, so it was a 5 minute walk. Also, the room was larger and louder, which allowed us to relax a little about the noise that Ezra was making. And finally, the food was really good…we enjoyed the presentation and the flavor, as well as the service.

Following dinner, we had a nice interlude near our room with some ice cream. We sat outside on a sofa and enjoyed the cool breeze before heading up to bed. This would make a nice routine any day of the week.

It Brings Trouble With Time Changes. When we got here the other night, I accidentally unplugged the alarm clock…and since we are in another country, the cell phone didn’t automatically set it’s time. The resulting position was one of confusion when it came to the actual time. Yesterday morning came, and the sun appeared to us…causing us to burst into a flurry of morning activity when everyone was awake. We operated the entire morning an hour behind real time….which on a normal vacation isn’t too bad of a thing, but when we are trying to keep Ezra on a routine, it makes things difficult. Turns out that the time in Playa Del Carmen is the same as in Castle Rock…but that’s due to the fact that they don’t do daylight savings. Because the sun rises and sets an hour earlier, it is almost more difficult to adjust to than an hour time change. We think that with a steady clock, and a day behind us, we now have this figured out.

It Brings A Great View. We opened our curtains and were treated to that spectacular view that the hotel raved about the night that we arrived. The beach that you see in the photo is less than a minute walk, and there are plenty of great places to set up camp for a while. Oh yea, that’s a jacuzzi tub on our porch.

It Brings Heat. In the morning we had to walk up to the main building to check in with our transportation company to get back to the airport on Friday. It’s .5KM from our building to the main one, and you pass every pool, and every bar on the way. It’s a sprawling campus with all sorts of things going on at any given minute. But the walk up the center of the place, in the sun, was a good reminder of what sweat feels like.

It Brings Time In The Sea And The Pool. After we recovered from the morning time shift, we hit the beach. The water was interesting: shallow, warm, but with a rocky bottom in places. It’s something that neither of us were used to dealing with, but eventually learned to navigate our way around the rocks. Ezra loved the time in the ocean (okay, it’s the Gulf of Mexico) and he seemed to be a natural at hanging out in the waves. After the beach, we headed to the pool by the room to relax for a little while before heading up for an afternoon nap.

Eventually, It Brings The Night. The hotel has 7 or 8 dinner restaurants that are themed with different international cuisine. We made reservations at a different one for each night, starting with the Mexican restaurant. The food was pretty good, but Ezra had a pretty difficult time for some reason. Not sure if he was simply tired, or something else was going on, but it dictated that Ahna and I eat a little faster than we would have liked. We walked back to the room enjoying the coolness of the evening and hit the sack.

Boy, that was a long day of travel. It started with a ride to the airport at 8am, and ended arriving at our room at 8:45pm. The airports were fine, the flights were on-time and smooth, and Ezra did great….it just took time.

We flew into Mexico in the twilight of the day and left the airport in darkness….so we didn’t see anything, nor did we know what we were in for. As soon as we left the plane and got into the main terminal of the airport, the heat/humidity hit….and it was particularly hard since we had just come from a foot of snow (PS, it is snowing in Castle Rock again today, with 4 inches expected).

The gauntlet of salespeople in the airport was just as advertised…and we followed directions: keep your head down, talk to nobody, and get out of the building – then look for your ride. We had a van to the airport all to ourselves, which was a nice thing at the end of the long day of travel. Ezra slept for a total of about 45 minutes during the day, which is well short of his normal 3 hours of sleep; so the car ride and subsequent sleep was needed.

The total ride took just shy of an hour and was really interesting. We were serenaded the entire way by a Spanish language cover tape of American music (the Scorpions, the Eagles, and numerous other cheesy ’80s music). The road felt just like any airport exit road that you have ever been on: divided highway with lights down the center….only this one went on for the entire 60KM to the hotel. We passed through one small town, but by several McDonald’s and 7-11’s.

We also drove through a few police checkpoints…complete with the military-looking guys by the side of the road; while the larger officer sat reading the newspaper in the office that didn’t have a door. To complete the look, there were even dogs sleeping underneath the police pick-up trucks. I’m not sure if those checkpoints are there all of the time, or just due to the heightened security state that Mexico is currently under.

We arrived at the hotel, and checked in where a glass of Champagne awaited us….wow. We are in a suite that overlooks the ocean…wow. Not much to say about the room and hotel for now, more in pictures and stories later. The room did have lots of things awaiting us: a bottle of rum, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of whiskey, and two bottles of tequila. Yea, and the mini-bar is included. They did also have a plate of dried fruits and nuts for us…all really nice, some useful to a family, some not so useful.

(The pictures were taken at DIA when we had some time to kill before the first flight.)

The storm hit with full vengeance this morning. We got to the airport early to try to stand-bye for another flight, but they didn’t have seats….our flight was cancelled. As a matter of fact, pretty much everything after noon was cancelled leaving Denver. Oh, and our bags made the flight that we tried for, and are somewhere at 40,000ft between here and Dallas. As of this moment, my folks are braving the blizzard outside to come and pick us up from the airport. We have already made alternate plans, of which we will share later. Storm note: Castle Rock is slated for 2 feet of snow (possibly more, according to one station).

Here’s what our morning looked like at the airport: