Cancun Highlights

"This really sucks, said nobody, ever." -- The lovely Mrs. Gammons

We've recently returned from the Caribbean clime of Cancun, Mexico.  It was marvelous!  We went there with three other couples and stayed for a week at a big all-inclusive hotel where they catered to our every whim.  Very hoity-toity, and not my usual sort of accomodations.  (Any longer than a week and I might have turned into Mitt Romney!)

They used a wrist-band caste system to administer the level of luxury you received.  A yellow wrist-band got you a lot of the perks, a silver one gave you most of them, and with a black one you got it all.  We all wore the middle-class silver bands and enjoyed ourselves to the max.  I doubt the black band people had any more fun than we did.

Whether on the beach or sitting by the huge pool, waiters and waitresses made sure we had plenty of potables all day long.  Sometimes, we skipped the middleman and plopped our butts at one of the two swim-up bars.  Tough duty!

In the evenings, we'd clean up and then reassemble at the lobby bar for happy hour and dinner planning.  Most evenings, I was amused and amazed by the "Attack of the 50-Foot Women" -- many of the younger, attractive ladies wore incredibly tall, stilt-like high heels.  They'd arrive in waves and make the bar look like a WNBA convention.

Our hotel had 4 separate restaurants plus a very good buffet open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  And every day there was a nice outdoor luncheon buffet by the pool, or you could order a burger or pizza or a steak or whatever.  The food was plentiful and good, and unlike my last vist to Mexico 26 years ago, Montezuma did not take revenge on me.

One of the hotel restaurants was a Japanese teppanyaki place.  Our group ate there one night and we couldn't help but notice another group seated at a nearby hibachi table.  The men and women alike were all sort of scruffy, hairy, and skanky, with an abundance of tattoos.  And while we ourselves were not exactly models of sobriety and decorum, this other group took it to an uproarious new level.  They screamed and hollered the whole meal.  They knocked back tequila shots, threw signs, high-fived and nearly fell out of their chairs.  I'd never seen anybody get so damn excited about fried rice.

Later, we found out that they were a bar band called the Whiskey Dixons.  They were from St. Louis and were part of a Cancun excursion sponsored by a radio station.  And they'd be playing poolside tomorrow afternoon.

There was a small stage at one end of the large pool.  Every day, a group of peppy, young hotel employees would exhort the vacationers to participate in some activity or silly contest.  ("Ladies and journalmen, you can win a Hard Rock tee-shirt!")  After that, a band would come on and play for a couple hours.  And sure enough, that next day it was our dinner companions who took the stage.  Given their Don Julio consumption the night before, they did OK.  Just a country cover band, but tolerable.

Perhaps they had a bit more tequila during their set, because after they finished playing, their drummer decided to cool off by diving into the pool.  The only problem was that the water is only 4 feet deep.  The drummer sailed through the air like Greg Louganis and skulled himself big-time on the pool bottom.  Knocked out cold, and bleeding.  Strapped to a backboard, he got hauled off to the Mexican ER.

He was OK.  Sore as hell, awful headache, compressed vertebrae, but OK.  Saw him the next day wearing a big neck brace and a sheepish expression.  Drummers!

I think it was Tuesday when we all took a day trip to a nearby island, Isla Mujeres.  We ferried over, then rented a pair of golf carts for a couple hours.  The plan was we'd take a quick tour of the island by golf cart, then do a little snorkeling at a nearby cove, followed by poolside lunch at the hotel next door, all courtesy of our silver wrist-bands. 

We're good friends with two of the three couples in our little entourage.  The other couple are acquaintances and nice folks -- we just don't know them very well.  But they were the seasoned veterans on this trip.  They'd been to all these places before, they knew the ropes, and with their experience, they were essentially our tour guides for the week.  Which was very helpful.

So it was that they were the lead golf cart on our quick tour of Isla Mujeres.  And as soon as we got into the town, they never looked back and quickly lost us.  The streets were narrow and busy and filled with vendors and speed bumps and stop signs.  Their cart was faster than ours.  They were one block ahead, then suddenly four blocks ahead, then gone.  That's great, just friggin' swell!  We have no idea where we're supposed to go.  We are lost on an island in a foreign country, and no one on our cart can habla the Espanol.

It being a small island, we did eventually make it back to where we'd rented the golf carts, and with hardly a minute to spare.  We'd completely missed the snorkeling, but we did see all of the island, much of it twice.

When you're the leader and someone is following you because you know where you're going and they don't, isn't it incumbent upon you to keep an eye on your followers and not lose them?  Jesus!

Our ostensible leader/tour guide/hot-foot golf cart driver was also a source of quasi-enlightenment during the week -- that is, if you consider a non-stop stream of unsolicited opinions enlightening.  He's a corporate lawyer who vaguely resembles a younger Dick Cheney.  He freely shared his thoughts with anybody who'd sit still.   The trick, I learned, was to keep moving.  Even so, here's a sampling of what I "learned":

Ann Coulter is funny and smart.  Rachel Maddow is a bitch.  (How odd.  I see it the other way.)

George Harrison wrote and sang the Beatles' hit "Come Together".  (It was John Lennon.)

John F. Kennedy was the worst president ever.  (Really?  Not Buchanan?  Nixon?  Dubya?)

Flip-flops are the worst invention ever.  (I didn't even want to ask.)

Human rights cannot be granted by government.  Human rights are inherent.  Therefore, governement should not give any "special" rights to gay people.  (Following this logic, we'd still have slaves, there would be no labor laws, and women would be unable to vote.)

You can't force me to get a background check because gun ownership is my constitutional right.  (Wait a minute, I thought you didn't want government granting any rights.)

Islam is an evil religion that preaches violence and murder.  (Well, I'll see your radical imam and raise you one dickhead evangelical preacher.)

Name one thing that government does for you.  (I could name a hundred.)

Eventually, the lovely Mrs. Gammons had taken the bait one time too often and popped off:  "Hey, man!  I didn't come here for this stuff, so until your loser party 're-invents' itself, talk to the hand!"

Happily, he took it with good humor.  And the next day, he sidled up to the lovely Mrs. Gammons and said, "Have I told you lately that I hate Obama?"  Gawd!  Sometimes, ya just gotta laugh!

Friends, food, sun, sea, sand, and suds.  What else do you need?  It was a Great Vacation!