MEXICO...in pictures

Our family adventure to Mexico was incredible. My parents rented a 3 bedroom condo outside of Zihuatanejo (a less-touristy fishing village on the Pacific Coast, pretty far south near Acapulco) and flew all of us kids and spouses down south for vacation. The agreement was that we were responsible for paying for our own food and for one of the two rental cars required to seat the 8 of us (which my dad had reserved through Orbitz for a mere $99 each for the entire trip). Well, that's where the drama began. Unfortunately the term "reserved" must not be in the Spanish vocabulary because we arrived at the Dollar rental counter only to find that they only had one car left-a 7 passenger van. This would have been fine and we could have all squeezed in except for one problem: they wanted to charge us $700!!!! No thank you! After close to 2 hours of haggling, we finally worked out a deal (but there's only so much haggling you can do when all the rental counters are out of cars!)

Finally, we headed off to our condo. The drive there was a little sketchy because the road was not paved (which made me nervous at first). Playa Blanca (our condo) was definitely off the beaten path which turned out to be for the better as we tend to like to avoid tourist traps. The condo, grounds, pool and beach were beautiful!

The pool with "Playa Larga" (the beach) in the background

Our room (with view of the ocean)

Mom, Graham & Dad, walking along our beach

We did a lot of relaxing, swimming, wave bobbing, sunbathing and reading on the trip (I almost completed 2 novels!) but also kept busy with numerous other activites.

We hired a boat to take us to a coral reef, only accessible by boat were we were able to snorkle. I wasn't sure I was going to do it as I didn't have the greatest of experiences the last time I tried (I got stung by a jelly fish and the snorkle instructor came swimming at me holding a giant inflated puffer fish--seriously, who does that!) Anyway, over time I've discovered that I am quite frightened of fish. I hate knowing they are down there and would rather just pretend that they only live in the deep sea. So snorkling seems kind of crazy to me--why would I want to go in search of the fish? But I did it anyway and actually had a good time for the most part. I had a couple scares but really enjoyed seeing some GORGEOUS black fish with neon blue spots.

A snorkling Lani

Speaking of fish, they were everywhere in Mexico! We had some pretty large waves on the beach outside our condo that were great for body boarding. However, they were pretty powerful and so you had to hit them just right, dive through them or be completed pounded to shore by them. One afternoon, Josh and Ben were out in the ocean playing when a huge wave came crashing upon them. Ben dove through it and popped up on the other side with something in his hand (he thought it was his swimshorts because it was slippery). Then Josh yells, "Hey Ben! Is that a fish in your hand?" Sure enough, Ben had caught a 12-incher with his bare hand! Not a lot of people can do that, especially when they're not trying!

We also hired a boat to take us out fishing (mostly for the sake of the boys but us girls went along for the ride). My Dad caught a Spanish Mackeral in the first 20 minutes and then things were pretty quiet for a couple hours. The boys were getting pretty tired of manning the poles without any bites so I decided to take my turn babysitting. I had this feeling something was going to happen. My brother-in-law Michael had the other pole when all of a sudden we see this a ways out from the boat:

(Yes, that is a very large fish jumping). The best part about it was that he had this fish hooked on his line and it was jumping to try and get away. Before I knew what was happening, our guide, Arturo, grabbed my pole to reel in the line and get it out of the way so it wouldn't get tangle with Michael's fighting fish. It was then he realized that I had one too!! He handed the pole back to me and said "Be strong" by which I think he actually meant "You weak girl! It'll be just my luck that this thing'll pull you overboard!" (but of course his limited English left him with "Be strong" as the only option). HOLY COW! I started to reel in the line but this fish was STRONG! Once it got close enough to the boat and I realized how big it was, I was freaking out. It was a large sailfish (one of those fish with the long, sharp nose). It was thrashing against the outside of the boat and I thought for sure it was going to puncture a hole. Don't ask me how he did it but Arturo somehow heaved it into the boat and in an almost-smooth motion, wacked it hard over the head.

Here I am bravely viewing my catch:

Okay, so I may not have been super brave about it. I might be shrieking and trying to jump in the back of the boat to get away, but it's really difficult for one to tell from the picture. :o) Poor Arturo was probably wondering why girls were even allowed to fish. Arturo estimated my fish weighed about 30 kilos (66 #)!!!! I couldn't even lift it without help. Here are a few photos taken when we arrived back at shore to give you a better picture of the size.

Our 3 keepers (My sailfish was bigger than Michael's but his was prettier-we think we caught a husband and wife. Dad's fish is being held in the foreground by Ben).We didn't know what on earth we were going to do with over 100#s of fish so we brought the 2 sailfish to a restaurant and in trade for one fish, had them cook us the other one. They prepared it 3 ways for us--ceviche, fillets and almost like a fish version of shrimp cocktail. Here's my fish in it's dead form:
Oh yeah, and since this shouldn't all be about me, I should probably mention that a couple other people caught fish. Here's Graham's Needlefish (we didn't keep him because he wasn't good for eating): Oh wait, did Ben catch something too?

No, I think that's just his bait (but we had to give the poor guy at least one photo op with a fish!)As if catching gigantic fish weren't thrill enough, we also had a number of animal spottings while out on the fishing boat. We saw numerous unique birds and turtles and before we knew it, it felt like we'd entered Seaworld.....

Yes, that really is a dolphin swimming RIGHT next to our boat.

Oh wait, there was actually an entire SCHOOL of dolphins that swam with our boat! What a cool experience. It's crazy how friendly they are with humans. Before they came up next to us, we watched them from a distance, jumping out of the water and doing flips (JUST LIKE SEAWORLD but maybe with a little less grace).

The rest of our trip included wonderful things like a date night out on New Year's Eve:

Parasailing for $17

Sister time

Bad sunburns requiring the ultimate skin coverage techniques

Family meals w/ friendly stray dogs (Michael made the mistake of petting this one so it laid under our table through dinner and then walked with us for our 45 minute after-dinner walk. Poor puppy! We didn't even feed him and he still wanted to be with us...)

Our trip was absolutely fabulous and I came away from it so incredibly grateful for my wonderful family. Some people get tired with too much family time but I actually found that with each passing day with them, I grew increasingly more overwhelmed with how good I have it.

Oh yeah, the adventures definitely did not end here. There was that one last piece about the 8 of us missing our flight due to it getting changed without notifying us. Graham and I made it home much later that evening on a completely different airline (because we had to work in the morning) but the rest of the family was stranded for another night--the excitement never ends!

Adios mis amigos.