our tripod trip

leg 1: cancun

our mexican fiesta started off in cancun, where the boy's company takes its employees every year for christmas...i know - rough...

we stayed at the iberostar paraiso del mar, which i think literally translates into "that big ship that all the humans lived on in the movie wall-e." check out this description - it says it all.

with all our salmon colored couches, pillow menus and personal butlers et al., what were we to even do with ourselves?? why, try out the pillows of course

and then, we discovered the secret ingredient to the whole resort.

so we left in search of something less made-of-babies.

leg 2: sayulita

we flew from cancun into peurto vallarta where the plan was to go staight to yelapa (spoiler alert - leg 3 is yelapa). we instead decided to rent a car, buy a bag of oranges from some guy selling them in the middle of the highway (it was a hard choice between those and the giant reindeer antler pin cushions the lady next to him was selling), and drive up the coast to a lovely little town called sayulita.

we liked the town the second we drove in and saw a sign for the burrito revolution. step aside qdoba and chipotle. you've just been trumped by the world's best burritos.

while i would recommend visiting sayulita for sure, i would probably not recommend it during any sort of week long santa maria festival. you might be woken up at odd hours of the night to fireworks flying right past your window and think that your hotel room is under siege.

i would also recommend checking your time zone map before going. it turns out sayulita is part of the teensy little sliver of mexico in mountain standard time. when we drove from the airport to sayulita, we switched time zones and never even realized it until right before we were leaving to head back to peurto vallarta. good thing we got it straightened out though. it's always good to know what time it is

leg 3: yelapa

when you stay in an open-air pelapa in yelapa (shameless plug - casa aramara was AWESOME!! thanks, alex!), three things happen:

1. you for some reason always have the bananas in pajamas song stuck in your head, only replaced with the lyrics "pelapa in yelapa. do dee do do da dee."

2. you can't fall asleep any hour of the night because there's apparently a blind old senile rooster in the town that cock-a-doodle-doos his way all the way through the night

3. you get critters in your house.

we woke up one morning to find this crime scene

what animal comes in at night, eats a banana but leaves the peel, opens the fridge and takes one egg (ps, we had lots of good stuff in that fridge!) and then leaves his little grubby footprints all over the place?

i think it was a monkey. the boy thinks it was this monkey

other cool things about yelapa. they have multiple uses for soccer balls

people like our new friend tita live there


there's lots of bamboo shavings that come off the tree and make a decent paper substitute. since we had such a rockin pelapa, we decided on our last night there to throw a party for all of our new friends. and since we were feeling oober creative, we wrote our invites on these shavings

on our way back from delivering our invites, a bunch of the town kids came up to us and started telling us to drop those shavings right away. the little needles get on you and create a rash. luckily we had already distributed them all out...

people still showed up to our little party surprisingly, but everyone was at least an hour late. the more we thought about it, the more we realized that everything going on in this crazy place was about an hour late - people not showing up on time, things not being open on time...

then, on our very last night there, something clicked. after seeing half the town's clocks, we realized that the clock in our pelapa was an hour fast. we had spent the entire week an hour off. we were those old people who show up for dinner at 4pm and then go to bed at 10pm. all of our guests were right on time - we were the ones who were off!!

i guess our goal on the trip to "completely lose track of time" was accomplished