Home again, home again

What a lovely week! We had an absolutely perfect week in Puerto Vallarta, spent every day outside in the sun and fresh air, and just had a blast. So relaxing.

Flying in over Mexico was absolutely beautiful. When we came down last time, in 2002, it was the middle of the night, so I couldn't see anything. So flying in in daylight and seeing the mountains was breathtaking. I didn't dig out the camera and try to take any pictures, because I figured I'd probably get reflection from the glass anyway, but I tried to burn it into my memory, because it was so amazing.

We stayed at Canto del Sol in Puerto Vallarta, an all-inclusive resort. We were with Bob's best friend John and his wife Leslie, and John's cousin Craig and his wife Kelly.

Tres amigos (John, Bob, and Craig):

This was taken right after we arrived--or it might even have been at the airport. Bob has his travel documents holder around his neck. This one (Kelly, Leslie, and Willa):

was taken much later in the week, probably Thursday, after I'd gotten sunburned and we'd spent the week drinking and relaxing.

The pool was lovely. This was my view for most of the week:

This was the baby pool, just a few inches deep, on the shady side. I thought I was being very careful, and I stayed in this shady spot most of the time, but in the afternoon we would move over to the tables by the snackbar and play cards, and while I was careful to stay under the shade of the umbrellas, they apparently weren't really shading me. You could see the sun through little holes in the mesh of the umbrellas, and I guess the sun came through them because I got a pretty bad sunburn on Wednesday. Not so bad that it made me sick, but bad enough that it made me feel really stupid.

On Thursday we went downtown and ate in a restaurant, but every other meal we ate at the resort. I thought the food was pretty good; it's always kind of a gamble, and always kind of strange, but I was pretty careful what I ate, and no one got sick. Leslie got sick, but it seemed to be the flu, and not from the water or anything that she had eaten.

There were a lot of pigeons around the snackbar area of the pool, and we noticed one pretty little brown pigeon whose leg was swollen. It wouldn't have occurred to me to try to do anything about it, but one afternoon Bob and John captured her and took a look at her leg. John said it looked like her leg had been broken, and there was gauze wrapped around it that wasn't going to come off by itself.

So Bob held her while John clipped the gauze off with a nail clipper. We saw her later in the week, and she was limping a little, but her leg was no longer swollen--if they hadn't intervened, she probably would have lost it. We saw a couple of other birds who had gotten caught in fishing line, but they couldn't save them all.

More later.

previous | next