A week on the sunny Yucatan peninsula with the delightful Miss Janet!!!!

We flew into Cancun - and immediately got the hell out of there and took the ferry to Isla Mujeres, which is a bit more laid back. We had a hotel room on a lagoon at Playa del Norte:

Lots of nice views:


And some ancient coral reefs that really want to shred you to bits:

On our first full day there, we took a taxi to Punta Sur. There are remains of a temple there, but they were pretty much destroyed by a hurricane in 1988. There is a really cool path around the cliffs:


We walked all the way back, stopping at a turtle sanctuary:

If you like really cheap, really fresh seafood, Isla Mujeres is for you. Kind of like Key West on a budget - and with less Crackers (except during spring break, of course).

We took the ferry back to the living hell that is Cancun and rented a car. We drove west a hundred miles or so to Valladolid, which is a funky little city in the middle of nowhere. Although the Mayan Empire is no more, the Mayan people are doing just fine, thank you. They still even speak the language. We went to Ek’Balam, which is partly restored, and a great introduction to Mayan ruins:


Then we went back to our hotel in town. Almost all of the businesses in town were closed because of some big festival, but we did find a little bar with those swinging saloon doors and we went in. It was definitely a “Man-Bar”, and they didn’t really seem to know what to do about having a woman there, but they did a lot of ogling at Janet and smiling at me. I think she was some welcome eye-candy for them.
Here’s a couple of pics from Valladolid:


The next morning, we went to Chichen Itza, which is the best-preserved Mayan temple complex, but also very commercialized.




Knocked that sucker out early, then got out just as the herds of tour buses were arriving, and headed to Tulum, which is about the coolest place on earth - as far as I can tell.
We stayed in a little shack:

We had to share a bathroom, but $35 a night on the beach with free yoga for Janet? I could do that for a few years... The beach is a little reefy there, but the further south you walk, the better the beach gets:

After a couple of miles, you can always stop at Om for a swim and a Margarita:


This one’s for you, Sue:

Lots of birds everywhere. It seems that the further south you walk, the more boobies you see. I didn’t get any pictures, though.

We didn’t do the ruins at Tulum (which are supposedly more commercialized than Chichen Itza), but we made a short trip to Coba, which turned out to be my favorite Mayan ruin - the perfect mixture of jungle and ruins. There are ancient highways there, one goes almost 100 miles in a straight line to Chichen Itza. It still looks great after 1,000 years:

There are jaguars there, and you hear things moving around in the jungle. Coba also has the tallest Mayan structure that you can climb, but I wimped out on it due to my vertigo issue. Janet went for it and said it was great.


It’s kind of humbling. While our ancestors were living in mud eating swill and picking nits, these people were building these architectural marvels and highways, connecting communities hundreds of miles apart. Makes Stonehenge look pretty lame in comparison.



We had a layover in Fort Lauderdale and had a nice sunny dinner before flying back to the land of freezing rain.

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And now for something completely off-topic. Now, I understand that soccer players are some of the hammiest and lamest actors around, which does make being a soccer fan more than a slight bit embarrassing.

I also understand that Don Cherry is one of the biggest morons ever:

What an ass. Apparently, it’s a bad thing to celebrate a goal? And does Cindy Crosby have fish lips or what?

UPDATE: Ovechkin responds. And a little commentary from my favorite Caps blog.