MEXICO Part One: The Resort

We arrived on a sunny Saturday afternoon after 6+ hours of flying--the first time Tyler and I have ever flown together, actually, although we've flown many times in four years!

Ah, the extravagant Grand Bliss in Nuevo Vallarta, just outside Puerto Vallarta...


...with its giant potted trees that made the lobby smell like eucalyptus. Yum! I wish our apartment smelled like that every day.

Tyler's parents, Gary and Roxanne, as I mentioned earlier, have a timeshare and kindly let us tag along for the trip. Little did we know that we actually got our own suite!

The floors were cool and marble--or, they felt like marble at least. The king size bed was like heaven--we could both stretch our arms and legs out and still not touch each other! At night, the maid would turn down the bed and leave us little Hershey kisses.

She even made creatures out of towels, stickers, and flowers, which I thought was cute and creative, if not slightly creepy.

I even took a little nap on the chaise and pretended to be a damsel in distress. Because don't damsels recline on lounges? Can't you just picture it? I can.

The bathroom was the size of our bedroom. See that tub? It's a jacuzzi tub, and on the side were little bottles of bath oil, bath salt, and bubbles. I used all three in one bath. Heaven!

The living room. Our balcony overlooked the ocean...I'll show you that in a bit.

The kitchen! On the other side was the living room (above). I loved how open everything was.

The view from our balcony. It is my lifelong dream to live somewhere where every day I can open my blinds, step out onto my balcony, and see the ocean, and for a whole week I got to live that dream. Ty and I watched pelicans dive-bomb for fish in that lake on our first night. I don't know that I'd ever seen a pelican up close until this trip. They're huge!

Looking down from our balcony you could see the wooden walkway that led to the pools, the Mayan Palace, and various restaurants. I loved all the vegetation. Each morning gardeners would be filling bags with pruned stems, leaves, and flowers--the humidity and heat make everything grow fast and huge.

We had our own dipping pool on the balcony!

And a giant chair that easily accommodated two people. This was where many a nap was taken.

And where many a beautiful sunset was viewed every night.

Shall we lay by the beach under a cabana and order pina coladas from the waiter?

Or shall we lay by the pool (which is right by the beach) and order Coronas and strawberry margaritas?

It was about a five-minute walk along beautifully landscaped paths to get to the pools or the beach.

We walked a lot. Which is why I didn't feel bad about drinking all those fattening pina coladas.

I didn't bring my camera everywhere, but I wish I'd had it handy when we watched a sea turtle laying her eggs on the beach. "Amazing" is such a cheap word that I use far too much, and I want to find a better word to describe that experience, but whatever word it would be is escaping me right now. The female turtle digs a hole in the sand and gets into a trance-like state before laying her eggs. She didn't even notice the circle of people around her. When she was done, she used her big flippers and pushed the sand over the eggs, burying them, giving a few hard pats for good measure, and then crawling back into the sea, disappearing with a rolling wave. She did all of this completely nonplussed about all of us standing there. The resort has a turtle sanctuary, where they try to thwart nature by bringing the turtle eggs in a safer place where they can't get eaten by birds and other creatures. You can see the baby turtles hatch and make their way to the sea.

I also wish Tyler had a camera with him when he and Gary went golfing, because the groundskeepers caught a seven-foot-long CROCODILE! It was a big wire cage with a chicken inside as bait, and Tyler and Gary happened upon the scene just as the angry cocodrilo was hissing in its cage and thrashing its tail in fury. I never knew crocodiles hissed until now! 

Really, all we did on the resort was lounge, relax, drink, and eat lots of food. I did manage to go to the gym a few times, so that made me feel good. They would go around giving you chilled orange-scented towels to cool off with as you ran on the treadmill or elliptical machine. (24 Hour Fitness in New York, you should take some notes!)

We did travel outside the resort, going to the various markets and walking to Old Town. We ate at some pretty delicious restaurants, too! On Thursday I'll put up some pictures of Puerto Vallarta outside the resort world.