Paradise with powder white sands

Continuing in the long standing American tradition beginning with film and at-home slide projectors, we are passing along our vacation pics for your perusal. At least with the electronic version you don't have to eat a casserole and listen to every story and anecdote that is mildly related to each image. We stuck to short titles and pics that we hope inspire you to drool over our great time and wish you were in paradise.

We headed down to Mexico and spent the first 2 nights in Tulum at a cabana on the beach. It was fantastic. The cabanas are situated on a limestone cliff (very short) above a sparkling white powder beach with mature palm trees offering cooling shade. We didn't have electricity, but the candles added a special glow. Everyone went to bed at sundown and got up at sunrise and the sound of the surf and the feel of the ocean breeze made sleeping a joy despite the unbelievably hard mattress. :) We also got to eat some local Mexican dishes, which were fantastic. It was absolutely amazing.

After that we went up near Cancun for the remainder of the trip and stayed in an Americanized all-inclusive. It was also wonderful in exactly the opposite ways. Electricity meant the disco and dancing went on all night and the food at theme restaurants was anything BUT Mexican. We celebrated my birthday while there, at a Tepanyaki grill, but because of some miscommunications with the waiters, we were seated with only half the party there and some other people who only had half THEIR party...so we went out again the next night (and remembered the camera this time) and ate there again. I'm not a fan of Asian food, but the food was good and watching everyone attempting to use chopsticks was worth an encore performance!

For our anniversary, we went to a bio-preserve theme park "Xcaret". It was a really fun day. The highlight of the day, and trip, for me was learning to snorkel. The park is built on limestone riddled with caves and cenotes (sink holes). So they have underground snorkeling (pics here and here). It was amazing. Easy to learn since there are no waves to fight. At first it was so dark there was nothing to see, but in parts where the caves opened up into cenotes, there were fish around. As we swam closer to the sea, the water became less brackish and more salty and the fish got more colorful until we emptied out in a cenote connected to the lagoon and it was filled with neon striped fish of all sorts of shapes and sizes. It was amazing. That night we watched the show "Mexico Espectacular" put on by the park. We had decided this was not to be missed because they recreate the ancient Mayan ball game (a game like soccer played with hitting the ball with hips, not feet, and on a slanted court). We watched that game, and it was less than impressive, but afterwards the Uarhukua game really was the most fun. It was field hockey with a flaming ball. Brett got a video of a great play. It was a great, close game...no acting there.

We got back and the next two days it rained each afternoon, which worked out to give us time for an afternoon siesta and there was a beautiful rainbow outside our door both afternoons!