LDB Week 26: Baby goes to Mexico!

Pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I am a travel junkie. I get the itch about every, oh, month or two. :) I typically don't manage to talk Bryan into big trips that often, but I am fortunate that I have a husband who also enjoys traveling.

I had heard of the concept of a "babymoon"--one last trip as a couple before you have a young'un to tote around, too. Of course, I welcome any suggestion to travel. We have been talking about going back to the Riviera Maya, Mexico for a couple of years now, because we had such a great honeymoon there. I thought that seemed like the perfect place for our babymoon... a nice, but affordable, all-inclusive and lots of relaxation and good weather!

Bryan was a little resistant at first, I think mostly because he was concerned about me traveling. Luckily, I talked to my doctor about it and he told me he had absolutely no problem with it. Once I had the okay from the doc, Bryan was on board! Of course, that turned out to be just about 2.5 weeks before we wanted to go, but we have a great travel agent and we don't have a problem with fast planning. :)

Everything was coming along smoothly until the week we were supposed to leave. The forecast for our departure day, Saturday, started to look crappier and crappier--a big snow was coming! We tried not to worry about it, knowing how Richmond weather usually turns out (i.e., prediction = 6" snow, reality = 24 hours of rain), but the closer we got to Saturday, the more evident it became that the weather was really going to be an issue.

Early Friday morning, US Airways issued a travel waiver notice on their website. Anyone with plans to leave from certain airports (including Richmond) on Saturday could choose to change their travel itinerary to avoid the weather with no penalty! My boss said, "Why don't you just leave today?" Well, besides the fact that Bryan had been on night shift all week (so had just gotten off of work and had not slept), I hadn't packed (because I had all Friday night), and we had nowhere to stay Friday night (our reservation started Saturday), there really wasn't much reason not to go ahead and go.

So that's what we did. :)

While we stayed at a Courtyard in Cancun that Friday night, we actually ended up getting practically a whole extra day in our vacation, because we originally wouldn't have gotten to our resort until probably 6pm or 7pm on Saturday, and we ended up getting there a little after 11am.

Our five days were spent at Dreams Puerto Aventuras. It was a very nice resort, with a nice beach and a couple of nice pools. The food wasn't gourmet, but it was pretty good, and that was good enough for us. Our room was lovely and the weather was perfect--low 80's and mostly sunny most of the time. We took a trip one of the days to Coba, a Mayan ruins site, and also visited a Mayan family and a cenote, which is a sinkhole that is basically a fresh water swimming hole in the jungle.

It was incredibly relaxing and wonderful to have a little bit of time to just be with each other and not stress about work or getting the house ready for the baby or figuring out what's for dinner. Just this last week I emailed Bryan and said, "remember when our only job was to get up and eat breakfast and decide whether we were going to sit by the beach or the pool? I miss that job." Can't say I'd object to spending the rest of my pregnancy that way. :)

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