Day Three at the Sunset

It was a day to learn about another time share, a sister site to where we are staying. We went because they offered to pay our way back to the airport, gave us a discount on a spa day, and provided us with some water activities... why refuse? Yesterday we met a nice fellow, learning some more about the area, and on this trip we met some other time share refugees on the way, making it a little more festive - and the biggest surprise of all was that one of the couples is from Snohomish, just up the road from where we live in Washington!

My biggest issue with any presentation goes back to my career in public relations. The message 'should be' consistent. So if you are selling me on some high-end residential property with a breakfast, shouldn't the meal be on the same par with the location, or proposed location? Stale rolls and a conglomeration of eggs didn't sell me on the Sunset time shares.

However, the site is impressive. The quality of the workmanship on the units is remarkable, the views are incredible, but those units are also far away from the downtown, facing the Pacific - which you cannot swim in safely - and the roads up and down to the units are windy, steep and not walkable... no sidewalks. So a car or other kind of transportation is necessary for sure. But we enjoyed the tour and our guide was a pleasant fellow, too. In fact, he gave us some great tips for dinners and things to do while we are here. For the couple interested in a "destination" resort, utilizing the transportation provided by the resort, this might be a good buy. We met a couple who thought so.

On the bus back through town, I saw this wall of art messages by local creative minds with messages to share...

The last shot was taken on the beach where we had a picnic lunch on our own,

watching the Pacific waves roll in, in perfect form over and over again. After we got back to the "Blanco" and made ourselves a little dinner, we watched the sunset - again - did a little walk around the pool to get to the WiFi spot and finished up our e-mails and blogging... can't wait to see what tomorrow will bring!

Cabo is Fab-o!

Day One - We do have a sort of luck... curious at times. We arrived at the airport at 3:00 a.m. for the 5:15 flight to Cabo San Lucas in Baja, Mexico. Jey-hu received a call as we were standing in line waiting for the airline ticket folks to arrive and begin processing us. It was a call from Orbitz advising us that U.S. Airways had cancelled the Phoenix-Cabo portion of the flight due to “scheduled” maintenance on the aircraft.

You'd think they could schedule things a little bit better... But hats off to the airline’s agents who quickly found seats for the six of us who were being displaced out of Seattle. The two of us were put on Alaska, leaving at 6:15 a.m. which would get us to Cabo two hours later than expected.

It was a flight through San Francisco, CA, with enough time to find a place to order up a nice boxed lunch before we started on the next leg. Alaska’s offering on board at $3 a pop was considerably less appealing than the fresh chicken salad sandwich & chips I purchased along with some fresh pineapple I’d brought along from home. In just over two hours we were landing at the Los Cabos airport. The photo below shows what may be a sandy riverbed, inland from the coast. There are more mountains here than I expected, but never having been here before, it was all more than I expected!

But the time we made up in flying was lost as an estimated 450-500 other tourists were also arriving and had to go through customs. Finally we were able to get through customs without issue and found the taxi service we had been pre-advised to find. (Thanks, Keith!!)

And then we had the gauntlet to run - an “S” curve of human intensity I have rarely seen, unless you consider the running of the bulls in Pamploma! Guys were coming right up to Jey-hu trying to touch him, convince him to listen to them, and we kept on walking without talking at all, as instructed. Outside we found “Jose” who was waiting to get us to a taxi... but first we had to speak to Jorge who, it turned out, was a better salesman than the others, and he convinced us to go to Westin timeshare resort for breakfast on Sunday and a tour. (The zoom shot of the ricks rising out of the water is where the famous "arch" is and we have plans to take a day cruise out there while we are here.)

By the time we reached our charming hotel, Pueblo Bonito Blanco, right on the water, we had been up for 34 hours without sleeping... we had made the decision to get some business done on the home computer before leaving for the airport, knowing it was unlikely we would have the bandwidth to send large e-mails easily and that was probably a good decision in spite of our fatigue.

But we slid into the 80-degree pool and simply floated until sunset - dressed for dinner, took a few shots of the fading light but it is Jey-hu's last shot that earned the "Blog" award and is herein posted... and then we crashed.... totally wiped out. There is a lot to learn about this really lovely place - it's warm here almost year 'round and only gets about 5 inches a year in rainfall. Many of the taxi drivers do not speak English, so I am being challenged to remember what little Spanish I do know and learn a whole lot more. Even Jey-hu is getting bolder and using the few words he knows and is building his vocabulary. Tomorrow I think we may try and take the Beginner's Spanish class that the hotel offers. All in all, it's been very interesting and we really like this area a whole lot!

PS: Free WiFi is practically non-productive here... groan!