The trip is coming to an end

With our arrival in Cancun, Mexico this week, we have entered the WestJet flight map. We are one Buddy Pass flight away from Alberta and home. I do have lots more stories, pictures, and videos to post from our trip. I will endeavour to continue to write posts, even if the content is slightly dated. Today was supposed to be a beach day, but we are sheltered in our condo again today. While tropical storm Bud beats up the Pacific side of Mexico, a tropical depression on the gulf side of Mexico has filled our forecast with rainy days. The first day here was nice, but we needed to recover from our trip from Quito. As I mentioned in the Where are we now – Cancun post, the flight from Quito departed at 5:05 AM. When we finally got settled, had a quick dinner and went to bed we had all been awake for well over 30 hours. Sydney, the “I’m never tired” girl, slept for 15 hours and the rest of us racked up double-digit hours as well. I am contemplating the lessons learned, recalling the experiences we had, the people we met, the food we ate on this trip. I feel like I should be sharing these thoughts with you. But if I do too much of that, I’ll never get this thing posted today. So I’ll save the deep thoughts for another day.  

First Impressions of Cancun

We are staying in a condo that we rented via Airbnb. It has plenty of room and is fairly cheap, but that is because it is not “steps from the beach” or packed with all the amenities you can imagine. It has airconditioning, a decent Internet connection and some other comforts, so we are fine here. Lucas is OK with anyplace that has a pool and he has gone swimming every day so far.  Karen and I went for a quick dip before breakfast yesterday. Our plan was to head to the beaches after breakfast, but that was when the weather started to behave like the forecast. We had packed our bags and were about to head out the door when a strange noise arose from outside. It was heavy rains.

Another day, another thunderstorm

Since the afternoon rains ruined our plans to go to the beach yesterday, today we decided to get an earlier start. So, we popped into the cafe across the street from our house for a quick breakfast. As we enjoyed our fresh, hot coffee that now familiar sound invaded our peace. The skies had opened up again and heavy rains were coming down. We enjoyed a second cup of coffee while we waited for them to ease up. Below is the video I sent to my buddy Jose, who like us, was expecting today to be a beach day. The volume starts a bit loud, so be warned.

Ten Minute Tourists

So we get to officially add El Salvador to our lists of countries we visited on this trip. We had connecting flights through the airport here last year, but we didn’t think that justified saying we had visited the country. On this trip however, the first leg of the flight from Quito was on Avianca. In San Salvador we needed to connect with a flight on Volaris airlines. Apparently, those two airlines don’t work very closely together. It might be fair to say they don’t work together at all. Avianca checked our luggage through to San Salvador but we had to claim it and check it in on Volaris when we arrived. To do that we had to go through customs, pay USD $10 each, and get a stamp in our passports in order to get to the baggage claim. Once we had our bags we had to walk out the door, down the sidewalk along the terminal, and back in. Naturally, we took a few photos and video of our 10 minutes in El Salvador. Good thing we had a four and a half hour layover.