We are sitting on the boat in Palm Beach waiting out crummy weather. Originally we were going to start heading up the intracoastal waterway today, but the day dawned gloomy and gray with a forecast for thunderstorms with high winds. In the middle of the night one of these squalls came through with wind blowing 34 kts. The thought of maneuvering the boat while waiting for a bridge to open and having a squall hit us was not very appealing. (That and the fact that we both were a bit tired, too, between waking up with the squall at 4 in the morning and staying up too late last night watching the last couple episodes of 'Heroes' season 2....)

Tomorrow we'll fuel up and continue the trek north. We are hoping to do a combination of day hops on the Intracoastal and overnighters along the coast as we follow the birds north. It is pretty clear we're at the back of the 'Snowbirds' (the cruisers who travel back and forth along the intracoastal every fall and spring) pack - it is interesting to see how many fewer boats there are here in Lake Worth than there were when we were heading southbound.

However, as I sit here contemplating the gray skies and gray seas (gone, I guess, are the days of tourmaline blue waters and sunny skies) I figured I might as well make use of the internet access to update the blog with a past story I never got around to writing before...


Back when we were in Isla Mujeres we went on an adventure with our friends Lynn and Todd on 'Blue Marine.' We had a 'Grand Mayan Day'

One afternoon Lynn and Todd approached us with "an opportunity." They had gotten connected with a travel agent who books presentations for a "Partial Ownership" property outside of Cancun. All we had to do was listen to a 90 minute presentation and we'd get free ferry transportation to and from Isla Mujeres to Cancun,

From Grand Mayan Visit

free transportation to the Grand Mayan Resort, a buffet breakfast, $50US, a free Mexican blanket, and transportation afterwards to Tulum, a Mayan archeological site.

"If you've had a time share presentation in the past, this is not like that, No Sir. This is not a Time Share. This is totally different."

From Grand Mayan Visit

I haven't quite figured out the true difference between this place and a time share, and I wasn't about to ask and prolong the conversation. In a nutshell you "own" a couple weeks of an apartment at this resort (or other affiliated resorts).

From Grand Mayan Visit

I must say the place was beautiful if you are into sitting around a pool for a week. There were different pools with different ambiences all over the place. I personally loved the elegant areas to recline and pass the day.

From Grand Mayan Visit

No ordinary folding beach chairs here! The grounds were impeccable and I could see spending a long weekend lounging and luxuriating, but all of your vacation time? Probably not.

In the process of trying to get out of there we first sat through the woman who gave us the tour of the facility. Then her supervisor. Then his. Then the "exit interview." Then the supervisor of the exit interviewer. Then... Along the way we were pretty much told - "You obviously need this vacation." And "Don't you love your wife enough to do this for her?" And a bunch of other things which bordered on offensive but really just laughable. Of course when we booked this we were told not to say that we were on a sailboat.. Their target audience is people in hotels on vacation, not boating riff raff. I really wanted to say, "No. I don't really need THIS vacation - I've been on vacation for the past two years."

But then we wouldn't have gotten our loot!

We got our money, our blanket,

From Grand Mayan Visit

and our free bus ride to Tulum - our true purpose and destination for this excursion.

Tulum

From Tulum

Tulum the site of a pr-Columbian Maya walled city about 80 km south of Cancun. It is one of the best preserved coastal Maya sites. It stands atop a 40 ft cliff and must have been an impressive site when the Europeans first saw it - a large city in the "uncivilized New World"

From Tulum

The earliest date lifted from the site is A.D. 564 (the inscription on a stele) although historians think it was at its height around 1200 - 1521 A.D.. Tulum was a major link in the Maya's extensive trade network with both maritime and land routes converging here.
After a quick stop at Dairy Queen (Oh my goodness - a Dairy Queen?)

From Tulum

We hired a guide for our visit which was helpful. Entering in one of only three entrances

From Tulum

(to this day the Maya people are relatively short - Andrew definitely had to watch his head) we were met with the ruins of an incredible site. While this was an entire city with people of all walks of life, the buildings that remain are only those in the city's main center - the homes of the lower echelons would have been made of wood and palm and as a result only their foundation stones remain.
Although there were not really hieroglyphics in evidence at Tulum, we could see some of the architectural principles they used, such as the face carved into the corner.

From Tulum

One building even showed traces of the original pigments the Maya used to paint the buildings.

From Tulum

One interesting tidbit was that they can tell which homes were for the prominent and important people by the size of the door. The bigger the door, the more important the person was - I guess to fit the size of their egos! Meanwhile the portals in the temples were low and small, requiring the priests to bow down to enter - showing appropriate respect and deference to the gods.

From Tulum

From Tulum

It was a fascinating visit and I'm glad we stuck with the tedious hard-sell of the "partial ownership' schtick in order to see it.