garyandpearl

Gary and I are off on another adventure….

November16, 2014 finally arrived after counting sleeps for over 6 weeks. Sunday night we left the Medicine Hat airport on the 8:15 flight which was followed by a layover in Calgary. We took the Red Eye flight to Toronto, arriving around 7 am. After a 22 minute wait in line at Timmy’s, we ate breakfast! Caffeine was needed to stay awake: Gary had coffee, and I had a chocolate chip muffin! Our 10:15 flight to Cancun was delayed due to a lineup for the de-icing machine, so we eventually arrived at 3 pm instead of 1:20. Hundreds of tourists lined up at Customs in order to have the privilege of escaping the cold and enjoying the sunshine and warmth of Mexico.

Our Pharmacy Conference starts Tuesday at the Ritz Carlton, but we arrived a day early and enjoyed getting settled. Mexican food at the restaurant on the beach was in order, and we enjoyed freshly made guacamole and pico de gallo along with tortilla chips and enchiladas! Yum!

After a tour of the grounds, we enjoyed a much needed sleep after a very long day.

Tuesday morning we decided to go for a walk along the beach. My sunscreen and I weren’t prepared for a 3 hour walk. I tried a new spray-on and missed a few spots! 😦 It was a bit breezy, but we walked to the north tip of the hotel zone to a structure made of large blocks of concrete.

It creates a lovely lagoon area which is protected from the surf and is perfect for swimming.

On our way back we found a lovely fixer upper! Anyone want to give us a hand?

We enjoyed a tasty buffet lunch, had a sample head and neck massage from the staff at the Kayanta spa which is located about 20 feet from our room, and then had the difficult task of what to do in the afternoon. The sky, which had been threatening rain all morning, finally decided to give us a show and we had a great downpour.

“Let’s go shopping at the Marketplace”, we thought. We left the safe front doors of the Ritz Carlton and took the first bus that came our way. Perhaps we should have had a plan or perhaps taken a map, but we missed the first and second stops at the shopping area, so we decided to stay on the R2 bus and see how far it would take us. We thought that it would eventually bring us back to our hotel, but we weren’t prepared for how many hours that would take. After one hour we asked the bus driver and he told us to get off of the bus and cross the street to catch the R2 going in the opposite direction. We did so, but after waiting for a half an hour with nary a bus passing by, our brains thought that maybe the $2 that we paid to get here wasn’t that great of a deal if we had to pay a taxi driver $50 to get us back (before dark, I might add). Thankfully God had mercy on us and sent the R2 bus just as we were getting ready to hunt down a taxi. We arrived back just after sunset.

We just enjoyed a romantic two hour, 7 course meal at the Fantino restaurant located in the hotel. We enjoyed the delicious food, excellent service, and 1 1/2 hours of live piano music playing everything from Lion King to Phantom of the Opera. Of course the company was great, too!