July 13-18 at the Intercontinental El Presidente resort in Cozumel was thoroughly refreshing and relaxing. Lots of beach time spent reading, relaxing and forgetting about everything else.
This was our packing joke – all you need for a trip to Mexico: bathing suits, mask and snorkel, sunscreen, hat, and your favorite beverage. Not to forget the stealth escapee stuffed penguin.
Our New Orleans based friends Denny, Anne, Alex and Laura joined us and that certainly added a lot of fun and entertainment to the environment. They
finished their diving certifications on Thursday and Friday. Here they are hitting the beach after certification dives on Thursday while we relax under an umbrella with Blood Marys. We joined them on the boat on Friday as they finished up the checkout dives.
That meant that on Saturday we could all dive together. We headed out on our own small boat with Oliver as dive master, and Nancy as photographer/videographer. The private boat was fantastic. It was small and so we executed the back-flip water entry maneuver for the first time – much preferred to bumbling across the larger boats to the rear platform. Here’s a video that combines some of my G0-Pro footage with Nancy’s amazing photos and videos.
Didn’t Nancy do a great job? You can tell I’m a rookie with the Go-Pro – a number of good lessons learned for the next time.
Sunday was an uber relaxing beach day. In the evening we rented powerful underwater flashlights and snorkeled the reef in front of our rooms. An amazing variety of marine life just a few feet from the shore – ocotopi, king crab, lobster, hermit crabs, and huge shoals of tiny neon tetras. That was followed with a hyper competitive game of Jenga on the patio by the beach. On a previous evening we played Apples to Apples with equally entertaining results – lesson learned – know your audience when selecting the card to play. The “lobotomy” card is picked by Laura the neuro-science researcher regardless of the topic.
Here we are 
enjoying the sunset on our last evening. I head the question, “Can’t we just stay one more day?”, several times throughout the day.
Ceviche and octopus were popular dining choice throughout the trip. We also had a joke about getting “inked” by the octopus on our night dive. So it was funny when one of our Blue Apron meals on returning to real life was a squid ink pasta with shrimp.
Back to the real world again. Let’s do that again soon…