Making Our Way to Puerto Morelos

Any direct flight to Cancun should be considered the Party Plane, right? Every passenger was anxiously waiting to begin their vacation and the guy sitting next to me was no exception…except that he decided not to wait until landing in Mexico to begin his partying.

In order to keep himself occupied on the plane he decided to pull out his gallon ziploc bag full of mini bottles. Two hours later all but two of his bottles were gone. To be fair, he did offer Rob and I one of his last remaining, so that was thoughtful.

However, his consideration stopped there. He was LOUD and kept punching and kicking the seat in front of him where his friend sat. It made for an obnoxious start to our own relaxing vacation. Oh, well.

After landing we made it via shuttle (after dodging many sales pitches) to the car rental company. It took us FOREVER to get our car.

The man helping us was VERY particular about his paperwork. After already waiting 15 minutes for him to verify and print everything, He handed us two receipts to sign. Rob signed one and, to expedite, I signed one. My doing so upset him very much. He said now he had to void everything and start all over again. Okay….sorry. After another 15 minutes of voiding and verifying and printing his second attempt at getting Rob’s signature failed. Rob didn’t sign it EXACTLY the way he signed his name on his driver’s license. Upset again, the man voided everything and start over. After a third 15 minutes of waiting, Rob tried very hard to match his license signature. After a full and deliberate inspection, the man finally decided we were ready and responsible enough to get the keys to the car.

On our way out the door we got another hard sales pitch before we finally made it to the car. All we had to do was sign again and we were off…except for the tip the guy with the keys demanded. After some sketchy change was made and exchanged, we left in a huff, ready to finally let our vacation begin!

But wait, oh, the gas tank is just about empty. Okay, let’s find a gas station. After some tense moments when we were trying to decide if we were supposed to pump our own gas or just hand over our money to the guy standing next to the pump, we decided to trust the young man who was asking us how much to put in the tank. We hadn’t even had a moment to think about the exchange rate or metric system or the lack of speaking the same language, we said, “Umm, 40?” Surprised, the man filled our tank with about a liter and a half of fuel (40 pesos worth)…enough to get about 5 minutes down the road. After we realized what we’d asked him to do, we turned around and asked him for 40 liters more. Just a tad embarrassing…

A few more minutes of driving down the road and we finally made it to our first destination, Puerto Morelos!