My Blogger page is coming up in Spanish! Guess that is to be expected since I am in Cozumel, Mexico and Google is the Spanish version too. The pic was taken off our our balcony at 7 a.m. this morning. The beach area at it's best - quiet, with no people on it!

:-)

I am learning a bit more Spanish while staying at the resort - all of the waiters and staff have taken it upon themselves to teach us Americans a bit of Spanish. Even the taxi driver was helping out the other night. It is basically $5 to get to most places on this island and there are taxis everywhere. We only rented a car for a day to drive around the island and visit San Gervasio, the small Mayan ruins site and Punta Molas, the lighthouse area where the turtles come in to lay their eggs. We were told about the evening event that the park service has where you can help mark nests but it was in the middle of the night, ending at 3 a.m. Too late for me! We did see a number of crocodiles. I'll post one of the pics I took another day. Very creepy looking critters. Steve says they are all over the golf course!

Steve has been golfing just about every day and is playing in a tournament today. The first day he came back early with a huge tear in the seat of his shorts. When we went to dinner at the French Quarter, a lovely restaurant in San Miguel, the owner recognized Steve as the tourist with the ripped out shorts on the golf course the day before. I only had to deal with the embarrassment in the lobby, thank goodness!! I was at the front desk getting us moved to another room when he came back, red faced and undies exposed. We were moving upstairs and he had to walk up the flight of open stairs in the lobby like that! If we had stayed in the first room they put us in here at the Playa Azul I would have got on the next plane and went back home. No sleep the first night, and we had been up since 3 a.m. to catch our early flight out of Lexington. The room smelled so bad for mold that we couldn't breathe - even the sheets. YUCK!! Not only that but it was the room right off of the lobby and pool area and a wedding party came in on a late night plane and they were so loud in the lobby they may as well have been in the room with us. To make matters worse the loudest couple moved in next to us and then started chatting in front of the door at 6:30 a.m. again, when I was just starting to fall back to sleep. I was so tired and grumpy I was about it tears. The room we are in now had a sweet icky smell to it at first and we burned some candles and that helped. I think it had also been vacant for a bit because of the noisy air conditioner. But, it is big, with a separate seating area, and it is quieter, and the wireless works from the room! This resort got rave reviews on Yahoo and Travelocity, but I would only give it an okay. Yes, the staff is very friendly and nice but the swimming areas are rocky, with little sand. Guess Hurricane Wilma scoured away the sand. The pool is small and very murky. I stepped on a piece of chewed gum the first day - gross!! Full of little kids as this appears to be a popular family resort and we aren't "kid-friendly" tourists unless we have our own grandkids with us. I'd prefer something quieter. In the two hours we spent on the beach yesterday afternoon I had one little girl jump from the pier above us into the water directly next to me and send a wave of salt water right into my ear. Then she proceeded to fling her arms around to splash me. So we got out of the ocean and sat down to dry off. The little boy with the family in front of us decided to have a melt down and scream and cry because his older brother squirted him with water even though he was purposely standing in the way while the older one tried to wash sand off his feet. They left, I sighed in relief and then got nailed with water by the next group of tweens cleaning off and messing around with the hose. But, we old folks waited them out and had the place pretty much to ourselves for a little while before dinner. We were the one of two couples eating dinner here at the hotel restaurant. The fajitas were superb!

This is off season in Mexico - extremely hot! I thought I was going to have sun stroke the afternoon we wandered through the shops in San Miguel. This is a cruise ship stop so the shops are the same as the ones on St. Thomas, just more silver than in the USVI. After just a few of them I had enough. We stopped in Senor Frogs on the evening of the 4th and it was hardly crowded at all. Just a group of young Americans taking advantage of the $25 to drink all you want deal. We had one drink each and it cost us $23! We didn't say not to put it in one of the ugly huge palm tree shaped plastic tourist glasses so we got ripped off. We drank 1/2 of poorly made drinks and left them on the table. Won't go back to that place again.

The best part of the trip has been a long relaxing lunch on Polancar Beach. Fairly quiet with clean facilities, good food, friendly waiters, and a great view. We had our suits on but didn't even go in the water - just sat in the shade and enjoyed ourselves. Then we got sunburned while wandering along the trails at the Mayan ruins. Not very well kept up with few tourists around as it was later in the afternoon when we stopped. Mostly lizards sunning themselves on the rocks.

No reading I am afraid, but I have been listening to Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. It is wonderful to listen to as there are at least two storylines to follow, one in modern day France and the other during the the 13th century. It is a grail story with Alais, a 17-year-old new bride, given a ring and a book by her father, keys to a protector of the grail, when he leaves to fight in the crusades. During a dig in modern day France, Alice unearth a cave with two skeletons, a drawing of the labyrinth on the wall, and the ring, which is stolen. Two very unscrupulous French citizens (one who wants to destroy the artifacts and the other a descendent of the religious sect that created them) are after the ring and they think Alice is in danger as she was the last to have seen it in the cave. The stories intertwine with Alice have flashbacks of memories that may well suggest she is Alais in another time. I am only part way through it as it is 16 CDs long. We listened to it most of the way up and back from Green Bay. I loved it, but I think for Steve it was like having a woman talking in the car for several hours on end! I have a very tolerant husband - I had no clue it was grating on his nerves until the next day. I was more considerate on the way home. I listen to books in the car when I am by myself pretty much all the time so it seemed normal to me!

All for today. I may be in Cozumel, but I am teaching summer school so grading awaits me, just a click away on another Web site.