Adventure to Isla Mujeres!

We decided to revive our old travel blog, so here it goes...

The trip started out with a rude awakening as the alarm buzzed at 3:15 am in Portland the day after Christmas. We lazily rolled out of bed and slipped into the clothes that were waiting for us along with the tightly packed suitcases. Mom and Jim picked us up at Evelyn's house and we headed for the airport. We found a parking spot in the economy lot right away and luckily did not have to wait long in the bone-jarring cold before the bus picked us up for the terminal. We made it through check-in and security with no issues and boarded our Continental flight to Houston (All-Boeing fleet, we were on a 737-900 from 2001). The flight went smoothly, but was a little too long for Christina's patience.

Once in Houston, we learned that our flight was about 40 minutes late, giving us a 2-hour layover. We made the trek to our departure gate (and were very glad our layover wasn't any shorter!). Given the delay, my mom, Jim, and I went upstairs to the Fox Sports Bar for lunch before our flight to Cancun. Just as we started eating our lunch, we heard Christina yelling from below that our flight was boarding for an on-time departure (so much for the delay!). Turns out they switched airplanes so we could leave on-time but neglected to tell anyone. The boarding area was pure chaos, as an additional passport check was required and the boarding process lacked organization. It got to the point where everyone was boarding at once. We eventually did make it on and took off reasonably on-time.

The flight to Cancun was on a 737-800, this one from 1999 and it had seen some better days. The weather was cloudy most of the way, so there was not much to see. We touched down on the newly-added second runway at Cancun and taxied to the international terminal. The customs process proved to be a lengthly ordeal with various checkpoints and verifications. We all made it through with the "green light" though. The plan was to meet up with Brian and Kristen for the ride to the ferry terminal, with their flight landing about an hour after ours. We thought they were flying Mexicana (which landed at the other terminal), so we boarded the inter-terminal bus and hopped over to Terminal 2. We sat down at a bar and had our first Corona's of the trip, only to discover that they were actually flying American, which lands at terminal 3 (the one we had just left!). After paying for the beers, we boarded the same bus (much to the amusement of the driver) and headed back to where we started. Jim and I found another bar to sit and have more Corona and a huge plate of Nachos while my mom and Christina went off to locate our van driver.

Brian and Kristen's flight was a little delayed, but we all met up and got in the van to the Punto Jarez ferry terminal. Driving from the airport, I kept noticing all the "Americanized" shops and stores (Office Depot, Starbucks, WalMart). Guess we had not landed in "authentic" Mexico. We drove past all the Cancun mega-resorts in the distance and got to the ferry terminal just in time to catch the high-speed catamoran to Isla Mujeres. Mom made the comment that it was the nicest boat that she had ever been on in Latin America.

Arriving at Isla Mujeres was a vastly different experience that Cancun. The streets were filled with golf carts and mopeds rather than cars and buses. The taxis left from a central terminal and we had to split into two groups to fit everyone with baggage. The taxi had 162,000 km on it (impressive figuring the island is only about 10 km long!) and had certainly seen some better days. Driving on the island is a combination of loosely-defined traffic laws and survival-of-the-fittest mentality. It was clear that the taxis were at the top of the food-chain, passing every golf cart in its sight as well as some of the speedy mopeds. Getting close to the southern tip of the island, the dirver turned down a dark and bumpy dirt road. We eventually pulled up to our beutiful villa that we recognized from the internet as Casa de los Amigos. Getting into the house proved to be an interesting challenge. The keys that were provided did not seem to open any of the doors in the house. After about 10 minutes of fiddling, we finally were able to open one of the front sliding doors. Only then did we find the note that mentioned each door has a unique key! The house is absolutely beautiful and is best described by the pictures in the link above, so I won't spend too much time here. The only quirks that we noticed were that the "hot tub" on the roof is not really hot (more like a pool), and the stove was a little difficult to turn on at first.

We had arranged ahead of time to have a golf cart deliverd to the casa and found it sitting right out front. None of us had any recent experience with driving gas carts, so it took some time and a phone call to the company to discover how to turn it on (turns out you just put the key in and hit the accelerator!). Christina and Jim stayed home that evening while Brian, Kristen, Mom, and I went in search of food. The cab driver told us of a place called "Maria's Cantina" just down the road, but we could not find it and ended up driving about halfway back to town to eat at a taco restaraunt. The food was great, if not authentic. Driving back to the casa, we crested a hill and heard a POP from the golf cart followed by a slight hissing noise. Not wanting to stop to investigate, we kept going and made it back safely. Fifteen hours after our rude awakening in Portland, we crawled into bed in Paradise for some well-deserved sleep.



More to come later...