Better Late Than Never

Posted by Cynical Sarah on May 10, 2007

I’m a little late getting back into the swing of regular life again and getting my column and Web site updated. That’s what vacation will do to you though. I may have had a whole week to relax and recharge, but that doesn’t make it any easier to return to real life.

So here I am, back again for a couple weeks before I have to head out of town for a couple weeks for a business trip. (Though I’m not sure if you can really call two weeks working in Las Vegas a true business trip, no matter how much actual work I’ll be doing while there.)

So anyway, I just spent a week in Cozumel and had an amazing time. The island was incredible, the beach was incredible, and the whole experience was incredible. But part of the fun was the people that we met on this trip.
When we went to the Dominican Republic, the people there were mainly Canadians and Europeans. Again for this trip there were a lot of Canadians, but a lot of Americans too.

I went on vacation to a small island in the Caribbean off the coast of Mexico, thousands of miles from Vancouver, only to run into a group of college students from Rapid City, S.D., where my family is and where I moved from.

It was definitely a case of “it’s a small world.” They were vacationing now that school was out for the summer, and I don’t think it really mattered to them that they had missed the main spring break season. They had enough party to go around for the fairly deserted resort.

We also got pretty friendly with two couples from the Toronto area. They were quite a hoot and very friendly with just about anyone they came into contact with on the trip. They were the ones who actually pointed out the group of South Dakotans to us since one of the guys remembered that I was from there too.

We probably talked to these two couples every day were there. They were always on the beach and always up for a little chat just to see what everyone was up to. We even helped one of them pull off a joke on her friend back home.

Her friend had sent along an underwater camera with her to encourage her to try snorkelling while she’s on the island. She really didn’t want to do it – her vacation style was to lay in a beach chair either on the sand or by the pool and occasionally take a dip in the ocean or the pool – so she sent her camera along with us when we did a snorkel outing to a couple of reefs so we could use up the camera, and she could tell her friend she’d snorkelled.

She was so excited to pull off her prank, and it’s crazy that we now share in a secret with these four strangers across the country from us.

One of the more “colorfull” couples we met was one from Texas. They were actually part of a group from Texas that heads down to Cozumel every year for the past 10 years, or something like that. We met the wife when we’d stopped at the bar to grab a drink before heading off to get changed and go to dinner. It’s a walk up and order a drink type bar, but she’d pulled up a chair anyway and planted herself at the end of the bar for the afternoon. That’s how comfortable she was there.

In a heavy (drunken) Texas drawl she asked us “Hablo englais?” and started up a conversation with us. I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about. Eventually her husband wandered up to the bar to chat too. Poor Troy had a hard time understanding what they were talking about half the time through the accent. His tactic was to switch eye contact to the other person when he lost track of the conversation with one.

They were the picture of Redneck America though when they got to talking about politics. You haven’t had a good laugh until you’ve heard two drunken Texans tell you “Hillary Clinton, she’s a biiiiiitch.”

The people were a part of what made this trip even better than our trip to the Dominican though. It just seemed like everyone was just much friendlier and wanting to chat and have a good time.

Perhaps it was just the overall sense of fun and freedom on the island that did it. In the Dominican, you felt kind of confined to the resort unless you were on a group tour. There wasn’t much of a sense of safety there.

It was completely different in Cozumel. We could have rented a scooter or car and toured the whole island on our own and felt completely ok with it. We even took a cab into San Miguel to check out the shopping and were surprised at how nice the flea market area was and how friendly and not-quite-so-pushy the shopkeepers were.

I got to hand it to the Mexicans. They certainly know how to put tourists at ease so they can have a good time.

- Sarah L. Polson

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Tags: humor, travel, vacation

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