Vamos a la Playa: The Truth from Akumal, Mexico

Due to the quirkiness of the school calendar this year, my daughters' two-week winter break was scheduled from Monday, December 26 through Friday, January 7.  In the habit of always seizing any opportunity for travel and vacationing, my husband and I decided to follow the lead of my brother-in-law and his family and head south to Akumal, Mexico for the second week of the break in a bid to stockpile enough vitamin D in our systems to outlast the cold, dark Minnesota winter (although the early reports indicate, with some alarm, that winter is a no-show so far this year in Minnesota).

Akumal is south of Cancun in a coastal area known as the Riviera Maya:

It is sufficiently beyond the grasp and influence of Cancun and Cozumel such that it is still a quaint and small coastal town favored by hippies and scuba divers.  Even better, it is part of the former stomping grounds of the vast ancient Mayan civilization.

Staring at the bewitching blueness of the ocean, your thoughts begin to tumble and roll with the waves -- out and back and out again.  After many sun baked, beer soaked days of this, one eventually reaches a trance-like state in which certain profound truths reveal themselves with perfect clarity:

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Coffee is an essential and delightful morning beverage at any latitude.

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It is possible to have beer and/or margaritas with both lunch and dinner.  Every day.  Also, so long as it is after you have had your coffee, it is perfectly fine to have a beer before you've consumed your first solid meal of the day.  In other words, there is nothing wrong with the 11 a.m., pre-lunch beer even if you never ate breakfast.

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When on vacation in Mexico, a 44 year-old lawyer, wife and mother of two from suburban Minneapolis may begin to wear an anklet with shells woven into it and believe that it looks perfectly appropriate on her:

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Attempting to paddle board for the first time in the ocean will ensure that the entire beach perceives you to be lacking in both common sense and coordination.  It is also an excellent way to get soaking wet if you’ve gotten bored with swimming.

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Eating good food at a restaurant on the beach with sand beneath your feet and the ocean at your back is way better than eating good food indoors with your shoes on and no ocean.

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Even if you are not a natural born shopper, it is easier to go shopping and buy things when the vibrantly colored currency you are using and the equally vibrantly colored wares you are buying seem totally detached from your more bland, northern understanding of commercial reality:

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It is important to remember that the Italian you learned in college is not the same as Spanish, so that when you order “pasta con burro solo” for your daughter, you will realize that you have just asked the waiter for “pasta with only burro” (as in the mule-like animal) when you meant to order  “pasta with only butter."

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It is not possible to be uptight or harbor uptight thoughts while sitting in one of these chairs on a patio by the ocean.  It is also not possible to provide effective parental oversight while sitting in one of these chairs on a patio by the ocean.  The beer in one's hand is absolutely secondary in this scenario:

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There a are many more lizards in Mexico than is really necessary to create that air of the exotic:

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Despite what your family will tell you, there is absolutely no requirement that you actually go into the ocean and swim around in it when you are on vacation in Mexico.  It does not matter how much money you spent on your tickets, or when the next chance will be to swim in the Caribbean Sea.  I have consulted the U.S. Department of  State web site and read all of the excess verbiage provided by the airlines, and there is absolutely no you-must-go-swimming-and-get-ridiculously-cold-and-wet required for re-entry into the United States.  Hold your ground on this one and do not be bullied by your seemingly well-meaning family members.  They are not the ones whose core body temperature will fall to a barely life-sustaining 65 degrees when you accede to their demands and plunge yourself into the frigid embrace of the sea.  When they say it is warm, they do not have the same understanding of "warm" that you do.

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Nevertheless, when you go to Mexico, you should always pack the bikini that you are mostly (and rightly) afraid of (and therefore never wear), because (a) the people that came with you to Mexico are already stuck with you, and (b) you’re never going to see the rest of these people again, and if they can handle everything else strutting around the beach, they can handle you, no matter how pale and undisciplined your midsection may be.  It is irrelevant that you have no intention of swimming.  (There is no way in hell there will be a picture for this one.)

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Potable water is vastly under appreciated by Americans.  In Mexico, the best solution for susceptible gringos is known locally as "cerveza."

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Although you have transported them thousands of miles, your children will behave the same south of the Mexican border as they do south of the Canadian border:

 

This is closely related to "always sit on the camera before you take a nap":

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If you decide to speak to your family again after they have victimized you with unflattering photos that you feel compelled to include in your blog post in the name of journalistic integrity (as well as a self-imposed, mid-life vanity check), then vacation days and nights provide an opportunity to embrace your feminine side and do girly things, like smear green mud on your face and get henna tattoos:

 

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The Mayans pretty much kicked ass back in their day.  I mean, even now, we're worried about the calculations they did predicting that the jig is up at the end of this year.  Plus, they had a really good eye for real estate.  If they had just remembered "buy low, sell high" and hadn't gotten all exploited and conquered and stuff, nearly 2500 years later with a little fixing-up, this place would be worth some serious pesos:

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But perhaps the best truth of all is that the warm Mexican weather, even in December and January, ensures that I will only be cold about 10% of the time, a dramatic improvement from the norm of 80-90% of the time, so long as I can stay dry:

Adios.