64 DEGREES?

           Here’s an interesting fact for you. On March the 1^st, 2014 Deb and I flew back to Regina from Cancun, Mexico and there was a 64 degree Celsius difference between the temperature there and the temperature here! 64 DEGREES! Yikes! What a difference! Talk about a shock to the system. Yes, I know, I can feel your sympathy from here.

            If timing is everything, then our timing was about as good as is gets as we were on the Mayan Riviera for what was the coldest week of the winter yet in these parts. The whole darn winter has been too cold, if you ask me, but that last week of February was a killer. So I was told…numerous times.

Apparently, the 2013-2014 version of our Canadian Winter was the coldest since 1971, or something, and the second coldest in decades, but if this past weekend’s temperatures are any indication of what is to come then we should be done with that minus 50 crapola for this winter. I hope. If not, I may just have to find my way back down to Mexico again…by hook or by crook.        

One of the major factors in choosing a Hot Holiday is to escape winter, if only for a very short time, and, hopefully, shorten our too long Canadian winter. To that end, Debbie and Perry’s Excellent Mexican Adventure met the above criteria.

I could bore you with all of the details about how we spent a week at Playa Del Carmen and swam in the Caribbean Sea every day and we soaked up the +30C sunshine and a few cool beverages and snorkelled with the turtles at Akumal…twice…and went on an eco-tour of some cenotes, (a natural pit, or sinkhole resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater underneath; especially associated with the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico) and then we toured some Mayan ruins and basically enjoyed a wonderful week out of the -50C Canadian winter…but who wants to hear about that?

As we all know, “it’s a small world after all”…and that statement was even more evident before we left Saskatchewan. Turns out, a fellow employee and her husband were going to the exact same resort as we were! Who knew? And then, while Deb and I were boarding the bus to transport us from the Cancun Airport to our resort some guy on the bus yells, “Hey Perry!” and, sure enough, there was an old friend and teammate from my fastball days in Regina! He and his wife were going to the exact same resort as we were, too! I know it really is a small world but do you know how many resorts there are along that coastline? Lots. Lots and lots, so it made the coincidences even more incredible. 

I also went there knowing full well that there was a strong possibility that the Canadian Men’s Hockey Team would be in the final Gold Medal game that was to be played early Sunday morning. 6:00 AM to be exact. I even packed some appropriate Canadian hockey attire and was quite prepared to get up and go to the 24 hour Sports Bar but our early flight and the fact that I found the game on our room TV and there was 24 hour room service and a stocked fridge…suffice to say I watched the game in our room. And loved it! And I wasn’t the only one as you could hear cheering coming through our balcony door screen from many other rooms.

It was a great start to a fantastic vacation. Later, we celebrated the win with old friends and new and the Canadian colours were in full display throughout the resort making it an even better home away from home!

“We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.”-Paul Auster (1947-).