Honeymoon Highlights

For the most part there was sex, tropical drinks, sunshine and sleep. But here are a few highlights for you to enjoy.

Alibi Loses Her Mind
I don’t like to fly. I get nervous. Mainly I get nervous when I’m packing and when I’m on my way to the airport. Once I’m at the airport and checked in, I can take deep breaths and relax and I’m fine. This is why I like to get to the airport the recommended 2 hours ahead of time. I need the chill time. My husband forgot this. He was taking his own sweet time. I was wigging out but trying not to show it. We live an hour away from the airport. Our flight was in an hour and forty minutes. You think “okay you got forty minutes to spare” but in my mind I’m thinking “we have to park, take the shuttle to the terminal, check our bags, go through security and I still need a ½ hour to chill out. WE’RE LATE!!!” My husband has gone to the bathroom yet again and I am sitting in the car waiting. So I started yelling at my car. Loudly. He’s still not coming. I’m holding the steering wheel in a death grip. Finally I start pounding the steering wheel and yell some more. I look over and Michael is standing outside the car looking frightened. I have now scared the crap out of my husband. I drive like 90 miles an hour and we get to the parking structure in ½ hour. As we wait for the shuttle I apologize and remind him of my flying needs. “Okay,” he says still a bit nervous and annoyed, “I understand and I’m sorry I took so long. But this is NOT a good way to start out our honeymoon.”

We Have Been Chosen!
Our honeymoon destination was the Gran Mayan resort in Nuevo Vallarta (outside Puerto Vallarta). My mom said it was nice. Really nice. She did say “really” so I should have heeded that. But I figured whatever, nice hotel, Mexico, on the beach. How good does it have to be? My parents had taken care of the accommodations so it was basically a free honeymoon. I wasn’t going to complain no matter what it was like. Well we told the cab driver we are at the Mayan Palace (wrong place) so he drove us there and we were like “damn, this place is pretty cool looking.” We start to pull our bags out the car and the bell man looks at our confirmation form and says, “oh no you are next door.” Great, we don’t get to stay at the cool place. Then he says “The Gran Mayan is the top, the best place.” Well why didn’t you say so!!! We get over to the Gran Mayan and damn skippy if that place wasn’t the nicest hotel I’ve ever seen. Better than the Four Seasons we stayed at for the 4th of July. You walk past the alabaster entry into a stone foyer and there are like eight 40 foot tall Mayan statues lining the entrance and a 40 foot fountain in front of you. Our jaws just fell open. Our room was really an apartment with a full kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath and a balcony with a spectacular ocean view. Oh and the balcony had its own private wading pool! Michael started jumping up and down like a little kid. We giddily called my parents to thank them and Michael jokingly said, “Hey, you think next time you spring for decent hotel for us? Jeez!”

WONDERFUL!!!!
The first night we went to one of the restaurants on the resort. Since the regular tourist season hadn’t quite started the resort was maybe only at 20% capacity. We had a fabulous dinner with an awesome waiter. We shared a bottle of wine. That is I had a glass and Michael drank the rest. The wine and the service went to his head a little because he began talking about how great our waiter was and why can’t other people in service industries be nicer. Why are they so rude? This extended into a long diatribe on rude people, people with no morals, ethically challenged people, judgmental people, judgmental religious people, corrupt government officials, George Bush, unjust wars, crime, racism, apathy, general God-less-ness and a whole host of other peeves that my normally quiet husband has apparently been holding inside for quite some time. The conversation/speech was so long that it continued all the way back to the hotel and up the elevator to our room. I opened the door and Michael followed me in ranting about presidential misconduct the whole time. Now because the amount of alcohol he’d consumed and the fact that he’s got something of a sharp wit he was being outrageously funny and downright profane in his ranting. But I was cracking up the whole time so I just let him rant. Once we were in the room, his volume increased and the sound echoed off the stone tile floors of our room. But the walls were pretty thick so I didn’t concern myself. I took off my clothes and requested a massage from Rant Man which he happily obliged without even breaking his verbal stride. By now he was annoying himself. “My god somebody shut me up!” he’d yell and then proceed to harangue some other topic with obnoxious splendor. We’d been back in the room about 45 minutes when he got up to go get a drink of water. As he walked in to the kitchen I hear him yell back “WONDERFUL!!! The door is WIDE OPEN!!” He’d forgotten to close it and had been yelling at the top of his voice the whole time. I started laughing hysterically.

The next day we did a test. I stood all the way down the hall by the elevator. He stood in our room with the door open and said in a normal conversational voice, “honey can you here me?” With the stone hallways carrying his voice to me I heard him crystal clear. So anyone and everyone on that floor had to hear every word. I don’t know how someone didn’t come down the hall and punch him out. I suppose there weren’t many Republicans on that floor or they might have killed us. I guess we were lucky the hotel wasn’t at full capacity.


Lower Life Forms
The Gran Mayan is a timeshare. My parents have been doing the timeshare thing for years. It makes sense for them. They’re retired and they like to travel. Michael and I rarely travel. So as will happen when the Timeshare Uninitiated venture into foreign lands we were duped into sitting through the Sales Pitch. Well, they promised us 10% off all our meals…. and a free lunch… and a 500 peso gift card!!!! We weren’t going to buy anything and we told them that. Now my strategy with these things has always been to listen politely and agree with how nice everything is and then when they ask if I want in I just say “NO” repeatedly without any explanation. Michael’s strategy is to convince them that even though “we have money and could buy one right now! Today!” that we don’t need a time share. Now in the shark pool of timeshare sales, which one of us is bleeding? I could not believe he actually told them we have money. That we could write a check right there and pay for the biggest place they had but we simply have other plans for our money. Now all that is true of course but damn it, I didn’t want them to know that. Once they know, they are like pit bulls they won’t let go until all the blood has drained from your body and you stop quivering. So of course they kept coming at us with deal after deal. I mean they started out with the $40K deal and ended up with something in the neighborhood of $500 for pretty much the same thing. We were like WTF?! How does THAT work?! And they kept saying that we had to make a decision right there that minute because they were bound by Mexican Law (supposedly enforced by some red-coated Mexican "officials" who appeared to be drinking and watching tv in a nearby lounge) to only offer such amazing deals once and only once. If turned them down our names would go into a master computer and if we ever wanted to buy in later we be blacklisted to pay top dollar -- presumably $80K+. All of this was a load of crap and Michael told them that to their faces-- it was pretty funny to watch their expressions as the denied it. We could have gotten up and left of course but we were still holding out for the 500 peso gift card so we stuck it out. No less than 7 different sales guys tag teamed us for the four hour session (that was billed as 90 minutes) during which they offered us about 25 different time share deals. By the time we did get up and walk, Michael was livid. "Those bastards! Why did I tell them I have money? I should have told them that we are broke and that I'm unemployed and living off you!" I just kind of nodded and let him rant. It took me 2 days to calm him down. Thank god we remembered to close the door that night.

Michael Loses His Mind
Honeymoon. Sounds sweet doesn’t it? Well it isn’t always. Couples do fight. Even couples in love. Michael is a homebody. Although he enjoys a good vacation he really prefers to be home. So as the week wore on he was getting a bit homesick. But I think it was subconscious because it manifested itself in the form crabbiness. He pretty much started bitching about everything. The service, the people, (he still lauded our waiter from the first night but everyone else sucked). This wasn’t the righteous humorous rant of the first night. This was nitpicky bitching about stuff that really didn’t matter. Since I was pretty much having a good time I didn’t want to let him bring me down so I … well I tuned him out. I just nodded and smiled and pretended to listen. He caught on to this during a romantic dinner cruise on the fourth night. On the way back on the boat he pretty much called me out on it and I tried to deny it. But he kept pushing. So finally I just told him that it was all his bitching that was making me tune him out. “So I should just let people walk all over me?! You’re like everyone else. You let it all slide. You don’t stand up for yourself.” Now this is not even remotely true and he knows it. In fact, I can be a real bitch in the trenches. But I pick my battles. If the phone company or a credit card company is trying to screw us with excess fees I will clamp on like an alligator on a fisherman’s arm until I get my way. But if a Mexican busboy who barely speaks English can’t tell me the vineyard of what is quite obviously some common red table wine from a jug because he doesn’t know it and can’t understand me anyway I’m not gonna get ruffled. (That had happened earlier and Michael started complaining that people don’t care about their jobs and when he was a waiter for that brief two weeks back in the 80’s he’d memorized a whole wine list plus the day’s specials with all the ingredients and…yada-yada...) After that little argument we didn’t speak to each other pretty much the rest of the night. I did apologize to him before we went to bed but he pretended to be asleep. The next morning I apologized again just for good measure and he guiltily said that it had been all his fault (true ‘nuff) and how could he expect me to listen when he’d been acting like a jackass (again, true.) I promised to listen to him and not pretend to hear something when I hadn’t actually heard him or even been listening. We topped it all off with make-up sex and we were back to the sweet part of the Honeymoon.

Ahhhh…. I love being married.