Mexico Day 1

We had a blast in Cancun this past weekend. It's amazing how something you've been looking forward to for so long can come and go so quickly. But, we enjoyed every moment of our first vacation w/o kids since before we've had kids. We love 'em, but we've needed a break from them, the practice, and the goings on of life for awhile. All the stress of the past year was released as we relaxed on the white sandy beaches, toured ancient ruins, drank our free virgin daiquiri's and margaritas and snorkeled with the fish. My sister, Heather, and her husband, Dan, came with us and it was fun to show them around and have Cody be our official Spanish speaking tour guide.

We took the red eye flight out of Utah at 12:50AM, had a layover in Atlanta and continued our journey into Cancun Thursday morning. We arrived at 10:30, picked up our rental car and with our 2 hours of airplane sleep drove down to Playa Del Carmen for some authentic Mexican lunch. Afterward, we continued our drive southward to Tulum. Cody and I went to a town called Akumal on our honeymoon, which is between Playa Del Carmen and Tulum. We were able to take a brief drive through the town and found our hotel still kicking and standing.  It was fun to revisit our honeymoon site again after 7 years.

Cody and I went to Tulum previously and had a Mormon tour guide.  We asked for one again and a lady named Ruth became our friend for the next couple hours. It was neat to hear the parallels and her perspective on the ruins in relation to Book of Mormon culture. She has a Master's in symboligy, so we did think she stretched things a bit in her explanations, but oh well, it was still educational and worth our time and money. We started out with a short train ride down to the ruins.

I'm not great at remembering details about places and history, but here are some pictures from our afternoon.

This was pretty cool. Every time the planet Venus completes its rotation (something like every 300 days I think) it lines up exactly through this window on the horizon.

and is visible and perfectly lined up when one stands next to this stone on the opposite side of the temple grounds (the large flat stone in the wall). Pretty spectacular if you ask me. It's amazing what great architects the Mayans were.  There is a similar set up on the South side of the temple grounds that does the same thing for the planet Mars (once every 700 days or so).

And one of the coolest things about Tulum, is that it sits right on the edge of the beautiful Caribbean water.