If you had asked me a few months ago how long we planned to stay in Mexico, I would have said a couple of weeks.  But, here we are still, and not really sure yet when we are leaving.  At first, a visit my parents were planning in mid to late January threatened to disintegrate until we figured out how much easier it is to travel to Cancun than anywhere south of here.  We'd do almost anything to facilitate a visit from Gran and Gramps, and staying in Mexico longer was easy.  Turns out, it put smiles on all of our faces.  One of the nice things about the Caribbean is that nothing is really that far away.  So, instead of being stressed about maintaining a schedule, we are just chilling and taking our time in this little corner of the world for now. 

     We rang in the New Year in Isla Holbox at a very respectable hour: about 6am New Year's Day.  The band on the beach was still going and a few groups of revelers remained.  It felt great to wake up to a new year feeling rested and refreshed after a good night's sleep.  It's pretty easy to keep the kids up and happy when we are hanging out with a big group of friends, but they weren't very interested in trying to meet new friends hanging on the beach until the wee hours, and neither were we.  Ah, I guess we are getting old!

     It was a perfect day to rent a golf cart and explore the rest of the island.  Both the girls took a long turn behind the wheel and enjoyed the feeling of being at the controls without endangering too many others in the process.  The beach is perfect for off-roading, stretching out for miles to the east where it ends in a marshy lowland separated by a narrow channel from the rest of the peninsula.  The girls and I waded across the shallows to the uncovered sandbar.

With the forecast calling for the north wind to kick in that afternoon, we knew we were going to have to move Zia around the western corner of the island again.  On our way back to town we stopped to chat with the dozen kiters who were setting up for the breeze, wishing we could hang and kite with the group, but knowing we'd have a spot to ourselves down by our comfortably anchored boat.

     We hung out for another couple of days, enjoying the mellow vibe of Holbox, kiting, and working on school.  The waters offshore of here have recently become a favorite breeding ground for the Whale Shark, nature's largest known fish. In the springtime, you can sign up to go swimming with these harmless, 50 foot long, 18 ton beasts. Another reason to come back to Holbox.  We really did love the place and were told that with the wind from the south, the water even gets clear.  The sand is so fine that any movement of the water at all, it seems, stirs it up enough to make it too cloudy to see anything.  That was our only complaint, though.

     I had been fighting a sinus infection for several months by the time we left Holbox and I finally decided to go visit a doctor to see what we could do to get it under control.  That took us back to the anchorage in Isla Mujeres.  The whole family decided to accompany me on the ferry to Cancun.  AmeriMed, marketed to the tourist industry as your doctors office away from home, has a big facility near Plaza de las Americas.  We were able to coordinate a little shopping for the girls with some Christmas money they received from their grandparents, my visit, and a movie all in the same afternoon.  James Cameron's new movie, "Avatar," was playing in English with Spanish subtitles at the theater in the mall.  What a show!  We all enjoyed it, although Juliana says it would have been better if more of the sympathetic characters had survived in the end.  The only downside to the adventure was arriving back at the ferry terminal just as the 9:30 boat was pulling away from the dock.  Then again, there are far worse quandaries than having to wait an hour in a cozy little waiting room watching really bad soap operas in Spanish and listening to the big guy in the back of the room snore!  It was hilarious.

     With my parents arriving in just over a week, and our intended anchorage spot for their visit as yet unverified, we headed south from Isla Mujeres, to the southernmost point of Isla Cancun, Punta Nizuc.  There is a small jetty that sticks out from the Club Med property on the ocean side, and around the point behind an extensive reef, a much more secure anchorage still within walking distance of their adjacent hotel.  We are hoping the weather will be calm enough, with wind out of the east or southeast, so we can anchor in that little corner on the ocean side.  But we now know our way safely through the reef where we can anchor no matter what the conditions.  We even found a way to take the dinghy all the way around, through the mangroves into the lagoon on the back side of the hotel strip.  It's a long ride but way cool.

     We worked out a plan for the next couple of days.  There was some nice wind coming on Saturday, and we wanted to try to be in Tulum.  From Punta Nizuc, we sailed thirty miles to Cozumel where we spent the night and continued on another thirty miles to Tulum.  The only problem, as we read up more on the anchorage in Tulum, is that the holding is poor.  The wind forecasts were looking pretty ominous, with three days of thirty knot winds on the way.  We decided to leave early enough to execute a back-up plan if Tulum turned out to be unsafe in those conditions.  There is a real deficit of cruising guides for this area of the Caribbean.  Our electronic charts are also woefully inadequate.  There are miles and miles of beautiful beaches but we have no idea what lurks in the waters off shore.  At any rate, it's a good thing our captain had the foresight to get us going at 4am because it didn't take long to figure out that Tulum, gorgeous in every other way, was completely inhospitable for anchoring.  Bummer.

     Puerto Aventuras lies 21 miles north, northeast of Tulum.  It's a tourist complex full of hotels, vacation homes and condominiums, a marina, and a myriad of tourist facilities.  We knew the kids would love it but we weren't thrilled at the thought of hanging out in a place that had so little flavor of the Mexico we love so much.  We also expected to pay top dollar for the marina fees.  Imagine our surprise when Gerardo let us in on the best kept secret of the Riviera Maya.  Sailboats get a special, flat rate at Puerto Aventuras.  At this time, it amounts to $20 a night.  I know we've been accused of being cheap by some (you know who you are) but you just can't argue with a great bargain like that.  This place was looking better and better.

     The girls quickly discovered their favorite feature of Puerto Aventuras.  Dolphin Discovery operates a huge dolphin swim program here, and even has a couple of seals and manatee.  The unique feature of this facility is the ability to simply watch it all happening from the sidelines.  The weather was freezing (low 60s), and we were thinking of saving up our dolphin swim until Gran and Gramps are here, so we spent hours just watching the animals and people interact.  In some of the pools, just the trainers worked with the dolphins without paying swimmers. 

None of us tired of just stopping for thirty minutes or so to watch these amazing creatures.  The manatee were a little less entertaining, doing nothing much other than munching down big heads of lettuce at feeding time. 

The seals, housed right next to the manatee pool, were amazingly frenetic in comparison.  Joe saw one, in the middle of a session of interacting with people, knock the little cooler full of fish off the wall and, ignoring all instructions, devour every last morsel. 

     We wound up hanging out for five days.  There's a great little bakery that makes excellent baguette daily.  A large variety of restaurants cater to the visiting tourists.  We met a wonderful British couple who own a condominium adjacent to where we docked.  They loaned us their car for a trip to the grocery store in Playa del Carmen.  In the end, it turns out that keeping us all happy and engaged is a lot more important than making sure we capture the authentic flavor of a place at every turn. 

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