Well, we are actually taking a winter vacation. it’s only 5 days but we haven’t gotten away during the winter for a long time. I think the last time was a trip with Sasha down to Disneyland for new years – 10 years ago. That was awesome. Los Angeles was going through an unexpected cold snap, with the temp dropping into the 30’s, and an Amish group was visiting Disney while unvaccinated and i caught Chicken Pox from them. (not joking – look it up) Fucking miserable trip.
This time we are going with some friends down to Cabo. We are staying at a nice little resort over on the San Jose side – Adults only. Hopefully no Amish either. Naturally, just getting onto the plane was an adventure. I warned everyone to get to the airport early – Yulia and I ar pros, so we were able to catch an Uber from our house, go through the Clear line in security, and get up the elevator to the Amex lounge in about 40 minutes door-to-door. The other couples were a bit behind – partially because they were checking bags. The bag lines were awful when we walked past them, and they only got longer. Sara and Simone managed to get through but by the time they got to the lounge the line to get in was 30 minutes, so that didn’t make sense. They headed to the gate and Yulia and I finished our free drinks, free breakfast, and got extra lounge gifts on the way out. Gotta make those lounge fees back.
We found Sara and Simone at the bar by the gate. If I have a superpower, it’s finding my friends at bars. Donny and Kevin were still in line to drop luggage. We grabbed some more cocktails and waited. With 5 minutes until boarding, we were a little nervous that they would miss the flight. Right then they both rolled up to the bar – and ordered cocktails to pound down before boarding. They took to heart my policy of “Never Fly Sober”.
Despite spending a hour last night preparing all our online documentation and new phone apps for tracking passports, Vaccination status, ID, tickets, and stool samples – i was still paged and called over to the front desk for them to manually look at my passport. No one else in our group. Just me. WTF.
The plane wasn’t too crowded. We were in the middle “Premium” class. That meant we paid extra to fly in a seat that had service and legroom that everyone used to get 15 years ago. But welcome to modern flying. It took a while and service came around. You used to be able to buy cheese trays and such, but now you can only pre-order those. and that didn’t work last night. So we were only able to get little boxes of chips and salami. Each box had a different name depending on which salty salami you got. We had fun trading stuff back and forth – I personally cornered the market on individually packaged Almond Roca. It was the best thing there. We all also got double cocktails. Not much chance they are coming back a second time so drink up now.
It’s noon and I’ve had 5 shots of alcohol. I’m slightly disappointed at this pace, but we are heading to Mexico so I know we will make it up when we get there. We have to wait for luggage, and Sara will have to smoke so we will likely grab a drink there, then we catch the shuttle to the resort and actual drinking can begin. It’s gonna be a good time I think.
No matter what, it’s warm. I’ll take that.
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We made it to the resort. It was a short drive from the airport with really long tollbooths. The resort itself was like every one we’ve been to – a secure gate and fence out front leading to the actual lobby. Yulia reserved this resort and totally hit the jackpot, It has beautiful Missions Style architecture, and the sun was just going down when we arrived. We could see the sunset streaming over the hills opposite the lobby, across the bay and local town. Everything was pretty efficient and we were in our room in a short time, with our bags following. Yulia and I had a view of the water across the palm trees – with a wedding getting setup just in the lawn outside our building.
We were starving by this point. and after a quick cleanup and change we left to get food at the Mexican restaurant in the resort. It was a good time to go since the wedding was getting started and we could hear the best man warming up for his very slurry speech. There were lots of tears, but there were going to be a lot more if we didn’t get some damn food right away.
We got a table, but everything seemed to be a bit short staffed. With a huge wedding going on, that’s not too surprising, so it took a while to get someone to seat us and start taking orders. We were all starved since we had been travelling all day and hardly ate. Once we had a waiter’s attention we ordered two of all the appetizers, and started a non-stop stream of wine and mezcalitas to our table. The first few appetizers were a bit experimental, including dried grasshoppers on a salad. (they do crunch a bit and the legs get stuck in your teeth.) But once the main food of grilled octopus, tacos, gorditas and everything came it was fantastic! We devoured everything and kept the drinks flowing. At some point we saw the bartender pointing our table out as another round of 8 mezcalitas headed our way. We were getting stares from other patrons. We closed out the restaurant then headed to the music bar for some actual drinking.
The music bar was close to our room, and was packed with everyone from the wedding. they had all moved off the lawn and were in the getting drink and dancing phase of the weeding. Donny and Kevin were having a great time chatting up some of the guys. They noted that these guys were not out of the closet yet, so their girlfriends were apparently in for a future surprise.
We had a few more drinks then called it a night. We were tired but couldn’t wait to see this place in the sun.
Cognitive Dissonance 