Day 11
Woke up early and headed out to the free breakfast that comes with our room. It was good…pancakes and eggs, and fresh fruit..OJ and coffee.
After breaky we grabbed four lawn chairs in the front row. We settled in for a leisurely day, we would have to start getting ready to leave around 1pm. We were taking the ADO bus to the airport, and we decided to grab the 2pm bus. Our place was due to leave at 5pm, so this would get us to the airport about 2 hours early. That’s a safe bet.
John and I went snorkeling out front, which wasn’t great. We saw a few smaller fish, nothing fantastic, but it is just so relaxing to snorkel. I also really liked that the beach area here, well the water area, had ropes all the way around it so the boats couldn’t come in to this area. That would make me feel much safer coming here with the kids, as I always worry about them out there snorkeling when boats could come by and not see them.
I took some more photos, a zoom of the Porto Real:
A ferry:
The beach:
I started to feel really rough, and got a bit of sleep in my lawn chair. But it was really, really hot today and it wasn’t making me feel any better. We went up to the room and John watched some fuzzy TV while I slept a bit more.
Check out time at the hotel was 11am, and our in-laws checked out at this time and left their bags with the front desk. We decided to try just putting the “do not disturb” sign on the door…we did this yesterday, and the maid didn’t come to clean the room until 3pm. Maybe it would work for today, too…..
Well, I guess it did work. At about 1 we got up and John packed everything while I rested a little more. I think I had a fever at this point, and I had started to cough. John was feeling a little better today, though. We decided to check one bag this time, and so John completely stuffed that one to make room in the other for the souveniers we had bought the kids.
We then left to go buy the bus tickets, and grab some last minute things like booze, hot sauce, a t-shirt or two, some snacks and water for the plane, and a couple of hamburgers from McDonald’s…(whatever! It was right there and fast and easy)
We found the in-laws and gave them their bus tickets, and we all went to retrieve our bags and go to the bus. I took two last photos from our balcony:
I wasn’t feeling good at all, not happy about the long trip we had to get home. It was five hours to LAX….and I took some Ativan and other things that helped me sleep a bunch, when I wasn’t coughing up a lung (poor guy next to me….he was very polite about it, but he couldn’t have been happy about sitting next to sickly me. And he’d be beside me on the next leg to Seattle as well! Nice kid though, he was about 24, and had been living in Merida for 2 years doing some kind of missionary work.)
In LAX we had to go through US Customs and Immigration before getting back on the SAME plane to fly to Seattle. AS USUAL, John was bothered at immigration, and they were taking a long time about it! We now had exactly 30 minutes to get our baggage from the turnstile, race halfway across LAX to our new gate, CHECK the bag again, and board our plane! I finally persuaded the guy to put John ahead in the lineup of folks waiting for immigration (persuaded = red-head freaking out and getting very excitable) The immigration guy kept telling me not to worry, if we missed our flight the airline would help us out. ???? I argued with him, because we bought restricted tickets that clearly stated “not our problem” for immigration issues…they wouldn’t do squat. We’d have to get a hotel for the night and purchase two NEW tickets for tomorrow…and on top of it all I WAS SICK!! Argh.
Finally John was done and it was now about 11 minutes until our flight leaves! We had to race through the airport, not having a clue where the heck we were going…I couldn’t run as my lungs wouldn’t allow it, so I told John to run ahead and not let them close that door of the plane! We finally got to the plane, and were the very last people boarding…everyone on the plane was probably pissed as they just wanted to get home!
We got into Seattle at about 1am. The in-laws were staying at a hotel by the airport where their car was parked, but we were driving straight home. It was not a nice drive as we were both VERY tired, but within about 2 ½ hours we were at our Canadian border…where they didn’t even look at our passports before letting us back in. We love Canada!
We ended up crawling into bed around 4am….at 7am the kids woke us. They were very excited to see us and wanted to see what we brought home for them. Jorden told us he had come in at 6am and stared at me for awhile but let me sleep longer. What an absolute sweetheart he can be sometimes!
So it was a great trip, full of meeting loads of great people. What more can I say.