Life with the Ball's: Mexico

Mexico happened and now we are home, wishing we could go back, and counting down the days until we can. In a nutshell, this trip was so much fun for every person in our family. With the wide age range of my boys, it's hard to find things they are all interested in but this trip fit the bill perfectly. I had to admit, I often referred to Henry as "Dead Weight" since he's too little to remember this trip so why the heck did I pay hundreds of dollars in airfare and passport fees so he could come along?! But I changed my attitude as I embraced the fact that being all together, instead of doing the divide-and-conquer routine that we've gotten so good at, was better than leaving Henry at home.
This trip happened because my good friend is a travel agent and I was asking her about Hawaii vs. Mexico and how the costs compared. Before I knew it, she had our trip to Mexico planned and we were so okay with that! We booked our trip fairly late so our flights were terribly timed but saved us so much money. And that is why we found ourselves at a little airport 45 minutes away at 4:25am. Unfortunately when I got to the ticket counter, the agent politely told me that we were too late for our 5:15am flight departure and she'd have to rebook us. I couldn't believe it! But I shouldn't be surprised. We always seem to have travel adventures/nightmares. I'm still skeptical as to why it was easier for her to find 7 seats on three connecting flights to Cancun than it was to just quickly check us in to our flight that was leaving in 50 minutes. But she rebooked us and we left at 6am only to find ourselves sitting on the runway for the next hour and a half. It was maddening! Eventually we took off but not after half the people on the plane had to figure out how to rebook their next flights they were going to miss. We are not fans of that airport to say the least. Luckily we made our next flight by the skin of our teeth but had to beg strangers to switch seats to allow Henry and me to sit together since the travel agent couldn't secure 7 seats together on our flights. Good thing my boys are good travelers and independent!
We arrived in Cancun several hours later than expected, and tired after a very long day. The rental car place was terrible and took two hours to give us our van that we had already reserved. We will never use Dollar Rental again! We finally arrived at 11:30pm to our condo (2000 sq feet, 3 bedrooms/5 bathrooms/full kitchen) where Henry immediately begged to swim in the pool that we had been promising him all day long. Well, the pool was closed so I made the best of the situation by filling up the big jacuzzi tub on the balcony and let the younger boys swim in it. Things could only get better from there and luckily they did. Sort of.
The next morning, Randy took off to Walmart to buy food and in typical Randy fashion, backed out of the parking stall way too fast and broke the mirror off the rental van and broke one of the parking garage lights in the process. What a mess! Thankfully he'd paid for the full coverage car insurance so once he got over the anxiety that came with that, it was nothing but awesome from then on out.

While Randy was shopping and wrecking the van, the boys and I were sleeping and woke up to beautiful sunny skies and the sounds of a tropical jungle outside. We even saw parrots flying around in the trees and a couple little green canaries landed on our balcony. The view from our balcony was breathtaking and instantly reminded me of Japan. I wasted no time getting the younger boys out to explore our resort. The pool was HUGE! In fact, it was a quarter of a mile all the way around. That's a lot of pool. We had fun running across the bridges and splashing through the shallow areas, still dressed in our pajamas. We saw lots of iguanas sunning themselves until we scared them away. So cool! And then we walked down to the beach. Oh my word. It was breathtaking. The sand was so white and soft and the water was the brightest blue. There were rows of lounge chairs and umbrellas and a club house with a little swimming pool so we could order food and eat right on the beach. I wanted to run straight into the water and roll around in the sand, giddy with joy. But I didn't. Instead we went back to our condo to wake up the teenagers and start our day. Once they saw the pool, the iguanas, and the beach, they were more than happy to be awake.