Day 6: The gales of November came early

Ok, so the gales of November weren’t really early since our cruise was in November. However, it was really windy and I’ll take any chance I get to quote Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Cozumel back to Mobile was rough enough that the staff hung up barf bags around the common area, especially by the elevators. As I had been doing the entire trip, I continued to self-medicate to fend off motion sickness. I was fairly successful at this. We spent a good portion of the day on the deck enjoying our last full day of warm weather until June. We took in one of the below-average production shows that night. Maybe I expect too much, but I think a cruise ship should be able to do better than a junior high talent show. The girls said good-bye to the friend they had made and exchanged addresses with her. They had lost the address by the time we got home and we haven’t seen any mail from her. So go vacation friendships. We went to bed early and plotted out how we were going to get up early, grab breakfast and be ready to disembark the second our floor was called. At least that was my plan. Read more on this article...

Day 5: Cozumel

We got off to a bad start. Our plan was to get off the boat as soon as it docked and catch a cab to the park where we had reservations for the girls to swim with dolphins. We couldn’t get off the boat when we wanted because another boat was docking. When we finally got off, Abby got wrangled by some guy dressed in aboriginal garb for a picture. A real man would have grabbed his fake spear and beat him with it. Being a lesser man, I just complain about it in a blog. We found the taxi stand and had to take 2 cabs to the park as there wasn’t a van available for the 6 of us. When we got to the park, the cabby “conveniently” didn’t have change. I made him wait for our other cab and got exact change, as opposed to way over-tipping. We got into the park and made our way to the dolphin experience, where we discovered our reservation was for 2 days later. We momentarily panicked, but the customer service person let us change the reservation to that day at 1pm. We had a couple hours to kill, so we hung out in the pool. Cozumel turned out to be the best part of the vacation by far. Zach really enjoyed the pool as it wasn’t crowded like the ship’s pool. The girls loved the dolphin experience and I took some crappy amateur video of it. They charged me $5 to be on the pier near the dolphins, which was cheap compared to the $75 it would have cost for their video. We wandered around the park for awhile and checked out the scuba area and the beach. We didn’t spend much time there as the boat leaves the dock at 5pm and we needed to do some shopping. I take that back, there was nothing we needed. Just a lot of stuff we wanted. Shopping at Cozumel was more pleasant than Progreso because the harassment was more low-key. However, the prices were a lot higher. I’m not exactly sure what we left Cozumel with, I think the girls got sun dresses and Zach was the big winner with a green turkey made out of a gourd (I’m not making that up). We got back to the boat in plenty of time, unlike some of our fellow passengers that had to get called a few times. Read more on this article...

Day 4: Progreso (not the spaghetti sauce)

By the time we got to Progreso, we were more than ready to get off the boat. The pier is 5 miles long for absolutely no reason at all, so you have to ride a bus to get to the city. I had done some research on Progreso so I had some idea what it would be like. I told the kids to stay close and ignore the harassing vendors. I was surprised and more than a bit annoyed by the vendors. Our goal was to go to the beach, and on the way we were constantly getting stopped. We stepped into a restaurant for a drink and vendors came to our table and tried to sell us crap. The restaurant owner/manager told us not to give the vendors any money, but never kicked them out of his restaurant. To cap it off, he tried to charge me for a drink we ordered but never received.

After our brief stop at the restaurant, we continued to the beach. It was, by far, the dirtiest beach I have ever seen. It’s a good thing you can buy penicillin over the counter in Mexico, because after being on the beach for awhile I felt an infection coming on. We walked down the beach for awhile and a guy that works for a restaurant on the beach offered us a table for $10. He said he’d bring some chips and salsa and we could get some drinks. It seemed acceptable, we were going to need a place to put our stuff and it provided some shade. Of course, we never saw the guy again. I don’t know if the tables actually belonged to the restaurant or if he really worked there. If that had happened to me in the states, I probably would have done something about it. Instead, I just chalked it up as a learning experience. And naturally, we still got harassed by vendors.
The same guy that tried to sell us balloon animals in the restaurant tried his luck with us again. People were selling t-shirts, bootleg DVD’s, kites, cloths, cigars, small children, hypodermic needles, herpes and massages. And yes, the herpes and massages go hand in hand. We hung out at the beach for a couple hours before heading back to the market to catch the smelly bus back to the boat.
On the way back, we stopped at some guys tent (I’m not making that up, it was a tent) who was selling jewelry. He first had to prove it was real shells and not cheap plastic jewelry by trying to light it on fire (Again, this really happened.) He wanted $25, here’s the conversation the followed:
Pyromaniac vendor: $25 for the necklace
Abby: I’ll give you $10
Pyro: $20. It’s real shells, didn’t you notice it didn’t start on fire?
Abby: $10
Pyro: $15
Abby: $10
Pyro: $13
Abby: Deal.
Pyro: How about $20 for two non-flammable necklaces?

Abby looks to her sister to see if she wants a necklace for $10, she says no so Abby buys one for $13. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of her. She stood her ground in the face of a flamethrower and when he tried to sweeten the deal by adding the 2nd necklace, she refused. She only wanted one necklace, and that’s what she got. I could give a short dissertation on opportunity cost now, but I don’t want to lose my 11-member audience. I’m pretty sure her and I are the only members of the family that would have done that. Gimpy would have walked away from the tent with 40 necklaces.
We wandered around the market and bought a couple more cheap souviniers. Zach got a t-shirt and we bought some flammable necklaces at the bargain basement price of 6 for $5.
We caught the stinky bus back to the boat and had a great sit-down meal that night. Our waitress was awesome, probably the best service we encountered the entire trip.
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