Riviera Maya 2012 Recap

We are back! My sincerest apologies for not blogging sooner, but between unpacking, laundry, grocery shopping, birthday parties, Easter and oh yeah, work, I've been a wee bit busy! We had a fantastic time for six days in the Riviera Maya, Mexico. If we're friends on Facebook, you've already seen these photos, but now you can get a little story to go along with them!

 We flew out VERY early on Saturday morning with a quick flight from Raleigh to Charlotte. We had plenty of time to eat breakfast and make our connection to Cancun. We had upgraded to exit row seats so John could stretch out his long legs, and we're glad we did. It was a long flight and pretty bumpy. We got off the flight and slowly made our way through Customs. Cancun's airport reported 511 flights and 76,000 passengers in and out of their airport that day, and we knew it! 

We made our way to the resort, and it was BEAUTIFUL!! 120 acres of lush vegetation lining the beautiful beaches of the Riviera Maya. Our room wasn't quite ready yet, so we found the pool, beach and lunch!

The collage above shows the view from our room, the walk to the restaurants, theater and plaza, room service breakfast and one of the fountains on the property.

Once our room was ready, we changed clothes and headed to the pool for the last few hours of the afternoon. You guys, the margaritas in Mexico are for real and SO good! We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant that night and went to the beach for the fire show. Check this out:

How cool is that!? I took these with my DSLR with a shutter speed at 1/6 and ISO at 1000.

We spent the next day at the pool where we met some new friends from Wyoming. They were our age and were actually married the same day and year that we were! We hope to stay in touch with them, as we spent a lot of time hanging out during our vacation.

 

The collage above shows a lot of the natural areas of the resort. There were iguanas everywhere, as well as Brazilian aardvarks, which the locals call Coati. Our walks to the beach were absolutely gorgeous. It truly was Paradise. Each night, we had dinner and then went to a live theater show. It was a lot like what you'd experience on a cruise, expect we stayed in one location.

We had dinner by the beach a couple of nights, one of which was with our new friends. We also took a bike tour of the resort one day. It was SO hot. We wanted to go straight to the pool and jump in after it was over.We did get a teensy bit sunburned, and we're both peeling now because of it. I'll take a Mexican sunburn over ghostly white skin any day!

On our last full day, we decided to take the tripod and camera to a more secluded area of the beach and have a little photo shoot. I think the photos turned out pretty nice!

 

The highlight of the trip for me was this - holding a monkey!! They brought him around the pool on our last night, and I was ecstatic. Seriously. It may have been a little embarrassing how excited I was. They snapped some pictures for us to purchase later, and we surely did! This little guy was so cute, soft, cuddly and smart! His owner just snapped his fingers, and the monkey changed poses. Precious. I wanted to hang out with him all day.

This trip to Mexico was even better than last year. While we stayed in on of the most luxurious hotels last year, this year was much more fun with lots to do! The rooms and service weren't quite as fancy, but we're happy to trade that for stuff to do. We had a blast! Our flight home went much smoother than last year. Even though the airline couldn't get the cargo door open to retrieve our luggage when we arrived back in Raleigh, they brought it to us the very next day, so it was no trouble at all. 

We are already thinking of where we want to go next year. Mexico has been fabulous, but we're thinking of trying something different instead. You never know where we'll go next!

Vegas in 44 days!