Cozumel Day One

Last evening I keyed the word "Cozumel" into the search engine and with the first picture that appeared on our monitor I got tears in my eyes. I didn't expect the reaction that arose within me. It caught me unaware and it swept me up.

Of course it was idyllic - our beautiful week there - it was vacation, it was in a house we could ill afford, it was with very special people who added so much to the experience. I am not self-deceiving, I do not think for a moment that actually living there would be the same as the week we had.

But Coz has magic. There is no denying that either. Coz has beautiful people, Coz has colors and music and a feel that hold magic. Coz was such a special, special experience.

The First Day: the van picked us up at about 3 AM and whisked us quietly and efficiently to the Philly airport. It is an other worldly feeling to be driving to Philly at that time of night. No one around - kind of like being plucked up and dropped into one of those spy movies....travelling place to place to reconnoiter with other agents.....well, maybe not, but with an hour of sleep, perhaps I can be forgiven for some drama!

The flight was really uneventful except for the fact that the seats in front and back of us contained families of sick and coughing children. I spent a great deal of the time breathing through the fabric of my sweat shirt! We landed in Houston TX after having a pretty decent airline breakfast. We had quite a hike to get to the gate for the flight to Cozumel, so the wait was short. I had really attempted to pack 48 hours of necessaries into our carry-ons - after our experience coming home from Scotland, I take that very seriously....not so worried about never seeing our bags again, but serious about what we might need for a couple of days.

Another flight, about an hour and a half or so, I think, and we stepped off the plane into warmth and palm trees and sun. O joy! Vacation had begun.

Once through customs, we stepped through glass doors into the reception area and were greeted by a virtual army of uniformed "tourist bureau" people. All bright eyed and smiles, they each called out "welcome to Cozumel!" We both thought that was exceptionally nice of the place to have people seeing to the needs of tourists. Ahem, read "naive."

After what seemed hours of being chatted up and at by our representative - cute little Oscar Lopez, the situation showed itself to be somewhat of a scam. They wanted to steer us to take the "opportunity" to be subjected to a presentation by a timeshare and by so doing, get a reduced rate on our rental car. Due to utter exhaustion and just to get it over, we signed up. During the indoctrination I was able to receive a text message from youngest son, wondering where we were and how it was going. I don't know if he ever received my reply as I no longer actually had phone service. As DH was signing contracts, I was able to get the phone to work long enough to call our rental house and connected to the manager who was awaiting us. He had had a driver come to the airport to assist us and to drive us, but we already had committed.

We were given an absolute giant jeep (hummer). Apparently Americans as a rule want huge cars. Lar drove it about 5 minutes, and around the first turn in town - with bikes, scooters, horse carts and crazy taxis flying everywhere - and knew he was going to exchange it next day for something smaller and more sensible. But as usual, he drove us safely and surely to the house. As we drove along the coast we couldn't stop saying OMG! and WOW! and variations of the same. The water and the sky.....colors you can't believe.....and if you painted it true to life, people would not beleive it could look like that.

We were in Cozumel....with lots of falling in love about to occur.

Here's Casa Linda....our home for a week.