We just got back from our trip to Mexico. We had a wonderful time and even more wonderful weather. It was in the 80s and sunny and it only rained for about 2 minutes one afternoon. We stayed at Barcelo Maya Palace. They have a number of resorts at Barcelo and Maya Palace was the newest addition. It was just gorgeous there! There aren't any doors on the hotel. It's all open when you come in. This is the same where the rooms are. It's like an outdoor mall everywhere. There's one restaurant that is open like that, too…just huge windows open to the outdoors. And they even have an outdoor theater. There are tons of fountains everywhere. Even outside the rooms! There are covered grass walkways…those were my favorites!
I thought I would include a few pictures. I could have added a lot more, but I had to stop somewhere! 🙂
Here's a picture of us next to an enormous waterfall wall.
This is a picture of the lobby when you walk in.
This is behind the lobby desk. It's all tiled and it's a big dragon on the wall. There was tile everywhere! It's probably the easiest to clean. They were cleaning the floors all the time with all the sand around, but you never noticed the floors being sandy!
Chuck, his dad, his grandpa and his cousin went golfing one day. They lost a lot of golf balls, but had fun! A few of us went to Playa Del Carmen for some shopping one day. 11 of us went snorkeling one day (Grandma and Hannah stayed back) and had grilled steak and lobster on the boat. The guides put a couple poles out and caught a barracuda. That was very cool to see!
This is a picture of the barracuda the guide caught while we were coming back from snorkeling.
And this is a picture of a barracuda that was HUGE and swimming around when Chuck was snorkeling. Thankfully he didn't see it. I didn't get my camera turned on fast enough when he was right under me, so this is a bad picture. But I promise that is what it is!
This map cracked us up! The red arrow says “you are here” but we are actually standing where Chuck's finger is! How funny!
We spent a lot of time just hanging around the resort, sitting by the pools, playing in the ocean, kayaking, sailing, snorkeling….and of course eating!
Chuck had a lot of fun climbing around on this big inflatable iceberg out in the ocean. I was no good at climbing it! And no this isn't Chuck on it, I just thought you might want to see how big it was!
Another picture I wanted to point out was the following. It was pitch black out and Chuck took this with some setting on my camera. I didn't realize it was so dark out when he showed me the picture! We took lots more of these that night!
This was in the dark, too but this gazebo was lit wth blue lights.
I had to throw in one picture of the grass covered walkway that I loved so much!
There are more night photos on pages 10 & 11 of the gallery that I really think are cool!
This is a painting we got on the last night we were there. It's an oil painting the guy did with his hands on tile.
On the last night we were there we went to a show at the outdoor theater. It was a very interesting show with great costumes. It was called “Mexico Prehispanico.” The part that was horrible ( and made at least 2/3 of the people leave) was a whistle that a guy was blowing all the time….into a microphone. On the last page of my gallery, there are two videos at the very end of this show if you want to see it. And we did end up leaving the show as well.
Oh, and the title is from one afternoon when I was napping in a hammock. One of the activity people wanted me to play Bingo. I told him, “No, it's nap time!” He says, “No siesta, Fiesta en Mexico!” Since it was so amusing I had to use it as my title!
I will post my gallery of the trip below and after the rest of the family get their pictures uploaded, I will get them added here as well!