Passport to Pass Out

Spicy!

The bartender was warning me that the Bloody Mary was going to be a Bloody Mary. Yes, I know it will be spicy. That’s why I ordered it. It’s my power breakfast.

The Amex lounge wasn’t open yet so we were in the SEA lounge at the far end of the airport. We are heading to Mexico this year. Tulum specifically. I’ve never been to Mexico’s east coast so this chould be interesting. Everyone has been saying that it is an amazing location, with a lot more than just the beaches of Cabo.

We escape the SEA lounge at the south end of Sea-Tac airport, and need to board back up at out gate on the north end. This lets me do something I’ve never done here – use the gate shuttle subway. Since this is my home airport I always am either coming or going. and ther eare little subways to take you to the N or S gates – but there’s a third subway that is for transfers between the two ends of the airport.

I’ve never used it until today. We made it across the whole airport in minutes. Super handy.

Once at our gate Sasha, Petru, and I were OK to board right away. Yulia had to check in at the desk. There was a bit of a minor screw up with Passport check – three of us checked bags so we were validated ahead of time. Yulia didn’t check anything and nothing told us to check her earlier so she had to re-validate. So did a bunch of other people.

This along with the plane being overbooked delayed our departure for a while. Yulia made it through and told us there were a whole bunch of irritated passengers having to check in again. It’s always something. After a bit the attendants chased the errant non-rev passenger off the plane and we were good to go.

One of the hardest parts of going on vacation is actually getting into the mental state to relax. Last year we were vacationing right after Covid lockdowns were lifted, but now we are in “The New Normal” it’s been an insane year where we are over busy from a lack of employees at the gym, and my work has been trying to transition over to a new team. We were up before 5 this morning and didn’t sleep well. There’s always a panic before travel that something has been forgotten. International travel makes that worse since forgetting a passport or something can make for a real short trip.
But we are good.

I’m on my third drink in first class and that’s already too much math for vacation.
One of the changes we see now is that you get a simple free data connection for the phone. it gives you the movies from the plane and text messages. The text messages are nice when Yulia is on a trip and I want to chat with her – but now she is getting work mesages and having to manage people while we fly. This is cutting into critical drinking time and just not acceptable.

On the upside we did figure out how to use the offline mode for Spotify. So we have music in our headphones for now. Its a bit of a mess of an app really. But a lot of things expect constant online connections, so I can’t be too surprised. Even writing this I’m having to use WordPad. WordPress itself has a PWA (Progressive Web App) that when you save it locally is supposed to give offline functionality. It doesn’t work. That’s just sloppy app writing and really not acceptable. But sadly normal.

Finally I’m a few drinks in. We are about halfway there. Stevie Wonder is on. I have rum.

I may have passed out at this point.

We finally made it to the Hotel after a good landing, slow passport control, and a fast shuttle weaving through Mexican traffic. The entrance to each resort it seriously imposing, and from the highway you really don’t know what anything looks like. We were dropped off at the front of our hotel, and it was amazing – a big grand open entrance, with a porter who ran to grab out bags and point us in the right direction. It’s amazingly well organized – far better than the places in Cabo we have visited. There was live music on a stage to the side, and people milling about in a little “market” in the atruim of the lobby. the scale was massive. This resort was far larger than I expected, with two main hotel entrances, and an assortment of pools, villas and restaurants.

I pushed for us to get an all-inclusive resort this time. Mostly because when we stay in something other than a hotel – I end up as the cook and bartender for the group. I don’t mind but it’ s nice to not have to worry about it for a change.

It was getting dark, so we dropped our bags in the room and walked back to the man building, the walkways were little boardwalk trails through a mangrove swamp, you could hear the animals and birds in the dark. We didn’t really have a scale for the resort yet, but found one of the main buildings and an open buffet. We were tired and hungry from our flight, so everything looked great. There was a lot of seafood on the menu. So that, a glass of wine and beer, and some snacks were all we could manage. It wasn’t that late but we were all too tired to explore more. We wandered the trails a bit through empty pools and found the beach. it was too dark to see anything, so we went back and passed out.

Tomorrow we start some relaxing.