We have established sort of tradition over the past few years where a friend's family / sister's family and our family head out for vacation during Christmas break. We are a group of like minded people with similar priorities and kids in almost similar age groups, so it has worked out well thus far. (tough wood).
After some discussions, we narrowed Cancun has our vacation destination. (we are running out of warmer destinations to visit during Christmas ... unless we agree to increase our budget:) ) Resorts / flight tickets were booked in early October and we thought we were all set. So the day of travel dawned bright and we were welcomed with a text from United airlines that our flight itinerary was "Rescheduled". Per our original plan we were to reach Cancun by 7:00am via a red eye flight ... but per the rescheduled itinerary, we were going to reach by evening 4:00pm. We were essentially going to miss out almost a day of vacation. That wasn't the worst part ... our new schedule routed us to Denver where we were going to spend 10 hours in airport (without lounge facility) before we could catch the flight to Cancun. It irked us to no end. Sister's husband in whose name the booking was spent a good 4-5 hours trying to negotiate with the United flight customer service, but their tone / understanding of the passenger plight was pathetic, to a point of being rude. It was almost as if without explicitly stating it the message was "This is the best schedule we can offer... take it or leave it. And if you leave it, no refund". We could perhaps have negotiated on the "Refund" part ... but we truly had our heart on the vacation and did not want it cancelled under any circumstance. So after much grumbling we took the offer.
Once the travel part was done ... the vacation was as good as it could get. We departed cold SF to be greeted in Warm Cancun. The humid weather reminded us so much of India and our spirits were up the moment we landed..the lost night sleep soon forgotten. Our resort was lovely and rooms tastefully designed. The next 4 nights we thoroughly enjoyed the warm weather and delicious desserts / ice creams.
Day 1 : Visited Xcaret : A surprise package : Previous night lack of sleep, led to delayed start on Christmas morning. Having not much choice since most tourist places were closed, we went Xcaret. Thankfully, the place did not disappoint us a bit. We enjoyed clay moulding, butterfly garden, lagoon swimming and the beach side lunch location. Special mention to the scuba diving experience that my older kid thoroughly enjoyed.
Day 2 : My favorite visit : Chichin Itza : The Mayan temple - Reminder of the mayan culture. It was such a lovely experience to learn about the Mayan "Warrier" culture ... we bought some artifacts after much bargain and I was pleasantly surprised with my skills ;)
Day 3 : Rio Secreto : Group favorite : Never in my life so far have I walked in river water flowing inside underground caverns. Such a unique experience ... the caverns are maintained spotlessly clean and the water temperature is pleasant at 25°C. Our group was split into 2, with the dads taking charge of younger kids and mom with the slightly older kids. The irony being older kids in mom's group who could swim were going to help out the non swimming moms :( Anyways, our guide turned out to be a superwoman, she managed to drag all 3 floating moms at one go when required. We felt accomplished, when we learnt we had managed to cross almost 13ft deep water at times. This place is a must go for adventure seekers ... walking in the river water is such a refreshing experience.
Our vacation ended with us waking up at 4:00am to catch 8:00am flight. There was a minor flight delay again, but thankfully not as bad. Our travel adventure did not end with just landing in SF. We managed to keep up the adventure going by exploring bart / caltrain / uber to reach home 3 hours past our flight landing. A scrumptious South Indian Thali from Saravana Bhavan was such a delight after eating continental food for past 4 days ... a great way to end our 2016 vacation.
