Mexico 1982

This week has been great!! Monday we hung around and enjoyed the silence of a day without workers. Tuesday we went to Cabo and picked out most of our flooring.

We choose a rough chipped-edged egg shelled colored travertine for the main room and bath. For our bedroom I want black stone behind our bed so we found wonderful chocolate colored stone for the floor, with black, and specks of rust in it. We ordered the “negra” flagstone for la Laguna’s floor and found chocolate tumbled marble for la Pacifica. Yesterday the company came to do all the measuring so they can give us a quote. Also yesterday Saul came to measure all the closet spaces so he can quote us on built in closets. His company is already doing our doors, well at least the wood ones. The large ones with glass will be aluminum, with a faux wood finish. So we are getting things accomplished...BUT...the best thing about this week is my friend Mary, and her partner Tom flew in on Wednesday!!! They got in just in time for pizza night at The Sand Bar.

I have known Mary since 1982, and our friendship was cemented shortly after our first introduction. Mary was a travel agent and needed someone to take a “fam” trip with her. This is a trip that an agent “fam-iliarizes” themselves with an area or property so they can suggest it to their clients. This trip was to Cancun. It was a great deal for me, as these “fam” trips are cheap, so I could afford to go. Off we go….neither of us very seasoned travelers. I with my matching sets of shoes and purses and both of us with way too much luggage. After a couple of days in our touristy resort we decided to rent a car and go somewhere else. We wanted to see Mexico!! If anyone has been to Cancun you know it is rather “Americanized”. Well 30 years ago it was being newly developed, and still very small, but we still wanted a more authentic adventure.

In our rental car we drove 8 hours to Merida, on the northern part of the Yucatán. We had a blast. We rented another hotel there...but that was not the best part of the whole thing. Our trip to Cancun was from Saturday to Saturday. As anyone who has ever been on a charter knows, you fly with the same group you came with, in a rather herd-like fashion. Well, on Friday night - the Friday before the Saturday we are to fly out of Cancun - we are still in Merida, eight hours away from the ariport. We never say anything to each other. I keep looking at the clock thinking, “if we leave now we can still make it”...but I don’t want to leave so I am hoping Mary won’t notice. When the clock struck the hour that would have made it impossible to drive back to Cancun, get all the unnecessary luggage we left in our room, check out of there and make our flight, we both looked at each other - expectantly - and started laughing and cheering and yelping! All the time we were both watching the clock, not wanting the other to notice the time. We were staying!! We sure broke all the rules, and we loved it. Mary knew that another charter would leave on Wednesday so all was good! She said we could go back on that one.

Naive.

When we did get back to Cancun everyone there thought we were “gone”. I mean really gone. Most of our luggage was in the room. No one had seen us in 4 days. Our group had left, thinking we were never to be seen again. The hotel needed our room for the next group and had to clear out our things, of course never thinking we would come bounding up the steps all excited from our adventure!

Mary got in huge trouble from the travel people; the tour company and the agency she worked for. She lost her second job as a waitress since she did not show up for work. I just followed her around, expecting her to fix everything...but all this was done with a slight smile on our faces! We were friends for life and what we had done was totally cool!!!

Since then we have traveled to many places in the U.S. together and have been to Europe three times. We have traveled to the mid-east and spent three months in 1988 traveling from country to country...wherever we wanted to stay we stayed. We have experienced many lifetimes together. Thanks to Mary I have seen so much of the world!

Now she and Tom are here. I love having my wonderful friend around me!! Last night we went to a Mexican dinner with a local guitar player, at a lovely place called the Todos Santos Inn. Today we are going to go watch the fisherman come in and we will pick out our dinner from their catch. After that we will come back here and grill it on our Betty Crocker electric grill that will be connected to our generator, outside in our construction zone. We will sip fine wine, and try to talk over the scream of the noise that the generator makes. It will be perfect!