Playa del Carmen, Mexico

For our 3 year anniversary, Matt and I decided to explore a part of Mexico that we had never been to before.  Costco had some great travel specials to Playa del Carmen, Mexico, which is about 30 miles south of Cancun.  After some great reviews from our friends and co-workers, we decided to give it a try for our yearly tropical vacation.  We settled on a hotel called the Royal Hideaway in a resort area of the city called Playacar.  The reviews we read online were promising, since we prefer the smaller hotels with nice, big beaches over the crowded high rises.  To make it more fun, this was our first time ever staying in an all-inclusive hotel!  The planning was a little different since we didn't have to research local restaurants or activities, but we were excited to drink (Matt) and eat (Me) all we wanted all week.

View of Hotel from Water

On the first day, our travel day, we arrived at the airport bright and early.  I decided to try to make the best of my 5-months-pregnant belly to get us through security without the backscatter x-ray and then get us upgraded to better exit row seats without having to pay the $50 per person fee.  It totally worked - thanks baby :)  We flew in to Cancun, and when we landed there was already a shuttle arranged to pick us up and take us to our hotel about 40 minutes away.  The drive was a fun way to get a feel for the city and how different it is from the very desert-like parts of Mexico we are used to on the west coast.  Definitely more of a Caribbean feel and even sort of rain forest-like in some areas.  We drove up to our hotel and were very impressed - the grounds were beautiful and the beach was huge and stunning.  Since it was already pretty late, we decided to just hit the hot tub before heading over to dinner at the hotel's Italian restaurant, Palazzo. This was probably my favorite food of the whole trip.  We had been so nervous that the quality of the food wouldn't be stellar and we would regret have wasted money on an all-inclusive.  But that was not the case at all!  It was outstanding 5-course meals at each dinner, complete with crazy good desserts.  We had to get used to the idea of eating whatever we wanted without considering the cost and it was a bit of an adjustment at first.  But I got over it pretty fast when I realized I could sample all of the desserts at the end of my meal instead of just picking one.  It was like a dream come true :)

Welcome Drinks

Fancy Desserts

Our Room

After getting some rest, we decided to spend day 2 bumming around the beach and the pool all day.  The weather was phenomenal - warm with a very light breeze that made laying out very comfortable.  Add that to the powdered sand and the warm water and we knew we would be spending a lot of the week just lounging around and recharging.  At one point during the day we felt adventurous enough to walk south down the beach to see the other hotels in the area.  All very nice and Caribbean-feeling, but the huge crowds made us thankful for our pretty private beach back at our hotel.  That night, my fun week of strange animal sightings started when we found what looked like a squirrel without a tail or a cabybara hanging around the grounds of the hotel.  We excitedly described the little guy to our concierge and asked him what the weird animal was, and he said it was called a tzereque - very common in the area.  We saw about 20 more of them over the course of the week, so I guess he wasn't kidding!  But they weren't very social and I couldn't get any of them to come up to me, even with food bribes.  On our way to dinner that night, we also found some adorable little kittens playing in the grass.  I know kittens aren't an exotic animal, but I always miss Jordan when we're on trips so I like to love on all of the wildlife we see to make up for it :)  Dinner that night was at Azia, which was a fun tepanuaki restaurant (think a fancier Benihana or Sapporo).  We stuffed our faces with sushi and fried rice/veggies/steak before heading to bed early in anticipation of our big day the next day.

Pool Lounging

Enrique the Tzereque

Azia Restaurant

 

Day 3 we ventured away from the hotel to explore a great snorkel site called Akumal we had read a lot about.  Playa has a lot of all-day activity areas where you can snorkel in "adventure coves," but we preferred to venture out on our own since we had come prepared with our snorkel gear from home.  And we had been told that Akumal was the "home of the turtles" and the best place to go to guarantee giant sea turtle sightings.  Once we got to the beach, we slipped on our gear and swam out a few hundred yards to the coral areas.  A lot of the coral in the region had been destroyed by a hurricane a few years ago, so it wasn't as colorful and beautiful as maybe Hawaii.  But we still saw a lot of cool fish, including cuttlefish a barracuda and a sweet neon-colored fish that looked like he would have been pretty in-style in the 1990's :)  And the turtles did not disappoint either!  We saw maybe a dozen different turtles hanging out on the ocean floor munching on sea grass.  They are such calm and beautiful animals, and they even let us swim alongside them a few times.  My favorite part was watching them pop their little heads out of the water for a quick breath before swimming back down for more grass.  After we had enough of snorkeling for the day, we headed back to our hotel to grab a quick nap on beach.  Then off to dinner at Las Ventanas, the modern American-style restaurant at the hotel - another delicious night!  Before dinner, however, we stopped at the hotel bar so Matt could grab a drink to fill his quota for the day.  He had decided to work his way through the entire list of hotel drink specials, and had made a good dent already by this third day.  But he needed a change from the fruit-based cocktails they specialized in, so he asked the waitress for a White Russian.  The only thing we can figure is that the language barrier made her think he asked for a "white wine with a rush on it" because she hurried out with a glass of white and proceeded to spill it all over us in her haste.  No harm done, but we did have to go in to our dinner smelling like we were all boozed up :)

Matt made a pretty good dent in this drink menu by Day 2

On the fourth day, we took a walk down the beach to downtown Playa del Carmen.  As we were walking, we were discussing what kind of Christmas tree ornament we should buy to commemorate our trip here.  Suddenly Matt says "how about one with a moon on it?"  I was really confused until he chuckled and motioned up the beach a few dozen yards.  There was a man standing on the beach with his shorts around his ankles and his white, white butt mooning the island across the way (Cozumel).  Just standing there, not doing anything obscene, but it was very bizarre and made us laugh.  Once we got into town we looked around the shops and finally settled on a brightly colored ornament with fruit all over it that felt very Mexico to us.  Plus, we had been gorging on fresh fruit for breakfast every morning since we arrived and most of the drinks were mango or berry laden, so it felt like a good representation of the city.  Next we stopped for a massage at a place we found on TripAdvisor called Magic Hands.  Those ladies were pretty magical - it was a great, relaxing hour away from the busy city.  To continue the relaxation, we headed back to our beach and finally grabbed one of the canopy beds that were strewn around the pool area.  Once we were there, we couldn't bring ourselves to leave the bed.  And since the waiters will bring you food and beverages from there, we didn't have to, so we stayed there all afternoon.  That night we had dinner at the Grill, which had great steaks and chicken.  When we got back to our room, there were adorable Halloween treats included with our turn down service.  We had almost forgotten that it was Halloween back in the states!

Canopy Bed

5th Ave - Downtown Playa del Carmen

On our fifth day there, Matt decided to see how well he remembered his sailing days back in Oregon.  We checked out a boat from the hotel's activity center and cast off into the water.  All of his skills he had learned as a kid came right back to him and he expertly guided us out to sea.  We had a great time gliding around in the water for an hour or so, and then my motion sickness started to set in and we headed back in.  We dragged a few canopy seats onto beach and just snacked and drank for a few hours with our toes in the sand.  Later that afternoon, as we were walking around the hotel grounds, Matt suddenly said "grab your camera and get excited!"  He pointed over to some bushes where a large, bushy, ringed tail was popping out.  The cute little guy attached to that tail turned out to be a coati, which are related to raccoons.  He was brave enough to grab an orange slice out of my hand, but then he apparently didn't love the taste of it.  I told Matt to watch him while I ran back to one of the hotel restaurants to grab him some better fruit.  But when I got back, he was heading away and no amount of my crazy calling for him to come back would work.  Each time we walked around for the rest of the trip, I carried a banana with me just in case, but unfortunately that was our only coati sighting of the trip.  That night, when we got back to our room, it had been decorated with balloons to celebrate our anniversary.  And then at dinner (Palazzo again), they presented us with a nice bottle of champagne as well.  Matt did his best to enjoy the bottle for both of us :)  Late that night, we took a stroll on the beach and enjoyed watching the lights from Cozumel in the distance.

Scotty the Coati

On our last full day in Mexico, I unfortunately had some issues with my head from a surgical site a few weeks back that we thought had healed.  Matt flexed his Spanish skills by walking down to the local farmacia and finding me some peroxide, iodine and gauze to patch me up.  I was feeling fine and didn't think it warranted a trip to a Mexican hospital on our last day, so we decided to just relax around the pool for the day and take it easy.  That meant we weren't able to rent kayaks like we had planned, but we made use of the canopy beds once again and lounged in the hot tub to pass the day.  The funniest part of the head issue were the looks that other guests and employees were giving us.  I think half of them were worried and thought I had hurt myself on an excursion, and the other half probably thought I had gotten some cheap Mexican plastic surgery while I was out there.  Ha!  That night for our final dinner, we once again ate at The Grill so Matt could get a good steak fix before heading back to the states.  We hung out on the beach and enjoyed the sound of the ocean before turning in for the night.

The final day in Playa was a quick whirlwind of packing, eating, and getting one last dip in the ocean before heading to the airport.  It was such a great trip and I am so glad that we were able to get away to celebrate another wonderful year together.  Looking forward to the next one already!!

Weekend Project: Guest Room + Light Boxes

This weekend's project was to finish up the final touches in the guest room.  While that room has been functional since we moved in (meaning it had a comfy bed and sheets), we still had to put up the shelves and pictures in the room.  This was pretty easy since we essentially moved the guest room as-is from our old house, so we didn't have to buy or plan anything new.  We just had to set aside the time to pull out the tools and get it done.  We drilled the IKEA picture shelf in above the bed and just set the framed photos onto it.  Then an easy-peasy hanging of some art that my friend Tiffany gave me when she moved to Minneapolis.

Then came the difficult part:  the light boxes.  We had bought these fun light boxes at IKEA a few years back to use as a night light for the guest room.  It is a metal frame with two light bulbs in each, and then you can select from a variety of glass art to place in front of the light box.  We had this one with the Leaf design to match our bedding:

The pane is made of glass, but it survived the move.  It did not, however, survive me dropping it as we were unpacking.  We went back to IKEA on the chance that they still carried this design - we have bought a lot of things there that they are still carrying years later.  But no such luck.  An internet search didn't show up any for sale either.  So Matt decided that we could make our own with some plexiglass and spray paint.

He bought a pane of the plexiglass from Home Depot, and I picked out a nice green shade of paint.  We used the dimensions of the surviving glass pane to measure out our new plastic panes, and Matt cut them out of the sheet using an exacto knife.  I used some butcher paper to cut out the new leaf pattern that I wanted to paint on.  I held the paper template in place over the new panes while Matt sprayed the leaves on.  A quick second template for the stem and some brown paint, and we had a masterpiece on our hands :)  Matt finished them off with white spray paint to make the glass more opaque, and then we left them out to dry and air for a few hours.  Once we had the light boxes drilled into place on the walls by the bed, we slid in the new panes and voila!  

We are now calling the guest room complete - welcome to Hotel Hesselbacher!

Close-up of the new Light Box

Lights out to see the Light Boxes in action

Weekend Project - How to Re-cover Your Dining Room Chairs

This weekend, Matt and I decided to tackle one of our projects from our to-do list: re-covering the seat cushions of our dining room chairs.  A few years back, we were given a huge, beautiful Crate & Barrel table with ten chairs from a friend of my aunt's.  At the time, our house was too small for the furniture, so we stored part of it at Kim's house and part of it in our attic.  In our new house, there is a dedicated dining room, which was one of the many draws of the place for me when we were house-hunting.  I have always dreamed of hosting big family or friend meals at a nice table big enough for everyone!  So the table has been set up in the new dining room for the whole four months we have been living here, but our goal to get the cushions re-covered got pushed to the back burner.  This weekend, we finally felt the motivation to get the project off of our to-do list!

Here is what the cushions looked like before:

 

 

Yup.  Gold.  With tiny Asian people... fishing, maybe?  Lovely for some, I'm sure, but not our style and not fitting for the decor in our home.  Plus, it felt a little weird/racist to be sitting on those nice Asian people's faces :)  It was time for them to go.  So we headed over to the fabric store to pick out a new pattern.  I found a nice, cream-colored linen with a very subtle floral pattern all over it.  From afar, it just looks like a plain, neutral fabric, but once you get closer you can see the detail.  Perfect for a house where we are trying to balance my love for all things girlie with Matt's desire to not live in pink and purple flowery cloud.  

 

 

Close-Up of the Fabric

 After that the real work began:

Step 1: Remove the Cushions from the Chairs

This went really fast - just take a power drill on reverse and remove all of the screws holding the cushions onto the chair frames.  Set the screws aside for later.

Step 2: Remove the Old Covers from the Cushions

This took a while and was a tedious little task.  Good thing I secretly want to work on an assembly line and don't mind mindless work at all!  I took a flat head screwdriver and pried up the old staples.  All 600 of them between the ten chairs.  For any staples that wouldn't come out willingly, I took a pair of pliers and gave them a light yank.  Hardest part of this step was keeping track of all of the flying staples as I popped them off one by one.  I would recommend vacuuming right after this step :)

Prying up the staples

Sooo many staples...

Step 3: Cutting the Fabric

Next it was time to cut the new fabric into the correct size.  We measured the old swatches of fabric that we had just removed to use as a template, since that seemed to be the easiest way to get an accurate size.  You could also lay the cushions on the fabric and give yourself 1-2 inches of hangover as well.  Once I had cut all 10 pieces of fabric to size, I threw them into the steam dryer to get the creases out.  You could also iron the fabric once it's cut, but I don't own an ironing board and I'm a little lazy :)

Step 4: Covering the Chairs with the New Fabric

This step takes the longest and is probably the most difficult part.  The best way to do it is to have someone help you by stretching the fabric while you put the new staples in place.  We set the cushions onto the fabric pieces (making sure the correct side of the fabric would be facing up once everything was stapled down!)  Then I stretched the first side over the cushion while Matt added staples about half an inch apart all along the side.  You could use less staples, but they are cheap and it guarantees that your fabric will stay in place.  Then we just moved around the sides of the cushion, stretching and stapling until everything was on tight.  The most important thing here is to make sure you are smoothing the fabric as you stretch it to ensure you don't have any visible creases on the cushion tops.  This is trickiest on the corners, which is why it's helpful to have a second pair of hands and eyes to ensure you're getting it right.  Once everything is stapled down, I cut away the excess fabric (without getting too close to the staples - otherwise they could tear through the linen and ruin your tight cover).  Repeat for all 10 chairs.

Step 5: Re-Attach Cushions to Chairs

Lastly, we screwed all of the cushions back onto their chair frames.  I held the cushions in place and made sure none of the fabric excess hung over, while Matt did the drilling.  Some of the screws or chairs were a little funky and wouldn't re-attach.  Over the years, screws would sporadically fall out, and we were hoping to avoid this in the future.  So for the ones that didn't fit quite right, Matt added some Liquid Nails to make sure the cushions stayed attached to the frames.

And that was it!  The whole project start to finish took us about three hours start to finish for all 10 chairs.  And the end result is lovely!  I love how my dining room looks now and I can't wait to host people for the first time at our new and improved table!

Finished product

My Dining Room - finished!

Aruba Vacay Part 2

Waiting for the bus

Picking up where we left off:  Day 4 of our trip we decided to make like locals and take the bus to downtown Oranjestad to walk around.  We figured the $0.50 bus ride would be better than a $15 taxi, so we went for it.  However, buses in Aruba are not the same as the Metros here in Phoenix.  For one thing, the driver didn't speak a bit of English and we don't speak one bit of Dutch (the native language there).  And it's not so much a "bus" as it is a van that drives locals around.  At one point, the driver was taking back roads and side streets through really run-down industrial parts of town, and we started getting worried that the bus didn't go to downtown at all.  We thought they might be taking us to a ghetto little town called St. Nicholas where, as Madi informed us, the "chocolate people" live.  Sounds delightful until you realize the people don't make chocolate and Madi was apparently a little racist.  So Matt and I start quietly panicking and make a plan to get off at the next stop no matter what.  When the bus stopped, we went to jump out and the driver must have seen our confusion.  She stopped us and managed to communicate, "No. Stay. Shopping next."  Phew!  Sure enough, the next stop was the downtown shopping area we wanted to be at.  Thank goodness she took pity on us so we weren't wandering around lost all day.

Shopping downtown was ok - nothing too exciting.  It was more of a major mall than unique shops like I had been hoping.  After a while, we decided to try a restaurant on the pier called Pincho's that we had read about, so we walked about a 1/2 mile up the shore.  We were sad to find out that they were only open for dinner, and it was still only about 1:00pm.  We were starving, so we walked up the beach further until we came upon a weird little place called Nikki Beach.  I thought we were at a hotel, given the pool on the patio and the large building, but apparently it was more of a club.  The whole experience there was weird.  Everyone there was European (mostly Dutch) and kept confusing Matt and I for Dutch-speakers as well given our fair skin and blonde hair.  They moved at a slow pace and were slightly rude, explaining to us "that's the European way."  Makes me re-think my aspirations to visit Europe someday soon :)

After a whole day of too much strangeness, we decided to treat ourselves to our fancy dinner for the trip.  We had read GREAT reviews about the Screaming Eagle restaurant that was just a short walk on the beach from our hotel.  So we made a reservation and headed over.  The cool twist to the restaurant is that you can choose to sit at a regular table, or you can sit in their bed area where you have your own private lounging bed with a privacy canopy around it.  Up for the experience, we chose to sit in the bed area.  It was really fun being served our food on a breakfast in bed tray.  And the food was insanely good!  Fresh mahi, awesome soup and salad.  Since it was our anniversary, they also brought us a decadent dessert with a fun sparkler fireworky thing in it.  The whole experience there was great and we went home full and happy.

Eating in bed at the Screaming Eagle

Sparkler in our dessert

Snorkel site

Sailing

Day 5 was our Sail and Snorkel day.  We went out on our excursion ship and coasted around the island a bit.  It was a gorgeous day and we had a great time sitting on the bow of the ship and feeling the breeze as we sailed.  They took us to a few different snorkel sites, the best of which was a sunken ship from the war.  It was really neat and kind of eerie to see the ship sitting on the shallow ocean floor with barnacles all over it.  There were a lot of fish around there that we had a good time spotting.  Matt is the best at finding the unique sea creatures (like eel, octopus).  I can only find the colorful ones :)  As our boat made its way to our third and final snorkel site, we had an unintended adventure as the boat came in to the cove where we planned to drop anchor.  Matt commented that we were coming in pretty fast, and he hoped they were planning to stop before we hit some rocks up ahead.  Since this was a sailboat and not a motor-powered one, there would be no way to pull back fast.  Sure enough, we slid into the cove and felt a jolt as the bottom side of the ship scraped along the rocks.  The crew was visibly upset as they jumped in to asses the damage.  Not bad enough to keep us from getting back safely, but you could tell someone would be getting their butt handed to them back at the marina!

Hanging out at Moomba Bar

After our sailing time, we walked up to the high rise area of Palm Beach.  There was a lot of activity there, apparently the sand tennis tournament was taking place that week (like volleyball and badminton.  But not.)  We grabbed lunch at a place called Moomba Bar that my cousin Bridget had suggested, and from there we could watch all of the beach activities taking place.  The beaches in that area made us very glad that we had chosen to stay in the low rise area, as they were very crowded and not nearly as relaxing as our Bucuti.  That night, we just headed back to our hotel and had burgers on our beach.  I could get used to that lifestyle.

Day 6 was nothing more than laying out at the beach, taking a break to dip in our pool or the ocean, then heading back to the beach for more sun.  We only broke that routine to grab a quick lunch at Matthew's, and then a quick dinner at Chalet Suisse.  The food there was not as nice as the name of the restaurant implied, but not much of our food stacked up after the Screaming Eagle meal.  Funny side story: any time we were in the ocean, these crazy ass pelicans would dive into the water at full speed to catch fish.  It startled me every time, but one time in particular a bird dove out of nowhere one foot away from my head and scared me so badly I screamed.  Matt and the other beach-goers had a good laugh at my expense there :)

Matt hanging out in the ocean

My friend Paco who lived at our hotel.  Fun fact about Paco: he screamed "Water" every morning, but his jumbled voice made it sound like he was screaming "Murder"  Fun times.

On day 7, we were ready for a little more action, so we headed up the beach to rent some jet skis.  Matt drove while I held on and enjoyed the ride.  We cruised around for about half an hour, exploring different parts of the island coast.  Jet skis are so much fun - we may bite the bullet and just buy some someday.  After that and some obligatory beach time, we decided to head to the Palm Beach shops to see what kind of nightlife they had.  We ate dinner at a cute place called Taste of Belgium (that had great Belgian waffles!)  They also had some live entertainment there that Matt and I shared a good chuckle over.  The woman singing had a thick Aruban accent, but was singing very modern pop songs like Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas.  Then we walked around the outdoor mall area.  Since it was close to Christmas time, a group of native Arubans were putting on a Christmas music show for free in mall amphitheater.  We stopped by to listen to that for a while and it was fun, funky and upbeat.  We bought our souvenir for the trip at one of the shops, settling on a tree ornament with an iguana on it.  I loved seeing all of the lizards all around town on this trip, so I thought it would be a fun way to remember our time here.  Back at the hotel, we snuck a bottle of champagne onto the beach and just listened to the waves as we drank to our last night in Aruba.

Belgian waffles

The next morning, we packed up our things and headed down to the beach for one last dip in the water and soak in the sun.  On our way back in, we got a fun surprise when we finally encountered a friendly iguana who wasn't afraid of us!  In fact, one of the other guests had sat down in the lawn to get a picture of the little guy, and he climbed right up onto his leg to say hi!  I told Matt to wait where he was while I ran to our room and grabbed a banana.  The iguana liked the look of the treat, so he walked right over to us and proceeded to eat the whole freakin banana!  It was adorable and awesome, and I thought it was a fun way to say goodbye to this awesome island. 

Our little buddy munching a banana

Matt hand-feeding a wild iguana

We headed home that afternoon and got back to AZ tired and glad to be back in our own bed.  And also happy to be reunited with our sweet pup, who had fun being spoiled by my sister for the week.  We had such a great time on this trip and made some great memories.  I would love to go back to Aruba someday to relax on those beautiful beaches again.  But now we are looking forward to our 3rd anniversary trip later this month to Playa del Carmen, Mexico!

 

 

Until next time, Aruba