"The Jewel of the Yucatan"

At the end of May Adam and I went to Cancun, Mexico with Adam's family. We had a fabulous time! Adam has been out of the country a number of times, but this was my first. It was very exciting. A slide show of some pictures of the week is included. Sadly, Adam and I kept forgetting our camera in our room, so we took very few pictures. Most of the pictures in the slide show were taken by Adam's family. Thanks to them for being smarter then us!



Anyway, it has been awhile since the actual trip, so there is much that I no longer remember, but I will at least give you the highlights and some of the fun things we did.

1. Most of the week we were able to lounge by the pool and on the beach and play in the water with Adam's family. It was very relaxing and tons of fun to play with Adam's family. On Monday many of us got sunburnt. Adam and I were grateful that we weren't burnt badly, nor were we the ones that got burnt the worst.

2. We won the kayak race! We were in teams of two: Barry and Nick, Julia and Robert, and me and Adam. It was a race from one side of the pool to the other and back (a pretty difficult course :) ). Oddly enough, Adam and I won despite Robert and Julia being the only ones with significant kayaking experience. We think it had something to do with me being a cute pregnant woman. These are the moments when being pregnant is not so bad! I was pretty proud of myself though. I had never kayaked before (I had wanted to try it out for a long time), so I told Adam to tell me left or right and I would follow. Other than the times he got his left and right confused, I was doing pretty good (at least I thought so).

3. Tuesday was our first tour of some Mayan ruins. An LDS tour guide took us to Ek Balam and Chichen Itza. At Ek Balam we were able to climb to the top of a couple of the structures. Once you got to the top, you could see over all the trees for miles. The first one was a little building. The second was much larger (see pictures in slide show). I really wanted to go up the second one, but I chose not to because of being lightheaded and dizzy. Normally, I would say I am fine and go up anyway; however, I have never been pregnant before, so I wasn't sure if I would actually faint or not. Fainting on those stairs could have resulted in a similar experience as my attempt to slide down the glacier on Mt. Timp (lets just say, my form ended up resembling a turtle on its back, head first).

Chichen Itza was much larger than Ek Balam. Bigger almost always means better! It was really cool to see the sites and imagine Nephites or Lamanites walking around. I especially liked some of the meanings the tour guide would give of the hieroglyphics/markings on the buildings that would expand our understanding of buildings and people. It made it feel more real and not just a "wax museum site" set up by the church to teach people about the Book of Mormon. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I really was in Mexico and not a visitor's center in Salt Lake :)

4. Almost every night of the week, after dinner, some of the adults got together to play cards in the lounge. It was really fun to just sit and relax after a fun-filled day and chat with everyone. It was always nice and breezy with some sort of band playing and waitresses coming around to give you drinks and peanuts.

5. Friday was our second tour to Mayan ruins. We went to Tulum. This one was right next to the ocean. Our LDS tour guide said that archaeologists believed it was just another city with some religious buildings, but the tour guide said it was actually a temple site. Rather than one building with many rooms, it was one site with many buildings, all with their specific purposes. It was very interesting to hear about the things that supported it being a temple site. It is really cool to think about the cultural differences in the way the gospel was practiced at that time and how it compares with the present and also Israel before Christ.

At the end of our tour of Tulum, we went snorkeling. I had never been snorkeling before. I really enjoyed it, except for two things: 1. I got water in my mouth a lot and the water tasted gross!! 2. It wasn't on a reef, which I have been wanting to see for a long time. But it was still worth it. It was neat to be swimming so close to the fish. It was probably a good thing that this was my first experience snorkeling; most everyone else had been snorkeling on pretty reefs before, so I seemed to enjoy myself a little bit more than they did.

6. We bought a hammock! Adam and I love laying out in hammocks on warm Sunday afternoons. We have been wanting to buy a hammock of our own for a long time, but even the simple ones are pretty expensive here in the states. So Adam haggled a little with a Mexican and now we have our very own hammock. The guy wanted $20 and one of our bags of chips from lunch. I thought the chips was a weird request, but we didn't have a problem parting with them; we didn't even buy them ourselves. Sadly, all the trees around our complex here in Ohio are too far apart to hang a hammock, so we are looking for places at parks or something so we can try it out.

So those are the highlights of our trip. We loved it so much!