The Mediocre...: Hurricane Alex makes a cameo

June 27, 2010: Sunday. Liz and I were excited to attend a ward down in Playa del Carmen. We hitched a ride with the hotel shuttle and walked the ten minutes to church in a light rain. I had my pants rolled up while Liz was wearing her yoga pants under her dress (to combat the wind’s urge to flip up her skirt).

The ward was nice. There was a group from the Sacramento area that came down and sang some numbers in sacrament meeting. Sadly, there was a man in the group that wanted to translate all the talks so the youth choir could understand. It was more a nuisance than anything else. He didn’t know all the words and so the speaker would have to repeat them. The translator soon gave up and a Mexican translator went up. She knew all the words in Spanish, she just couldn’t get them out into English as well. In the end, the speakers had free reign and could just speak. The meeting felt much better.

This was not the church we attended, but a church picture was appropriate here.

After sacrament, Liz and I braved the weather (the rain had whipped up again) and headed over to Wal-mart. We bought a gosh-dang umbrella. We headed down to Avenida 5 to check out the tourist shops and visit the beach. It was very touristy, but it was a great walk with my little lady.

We bought a very cheap lunch of pizza and soda (yup, in Mexico) and then headed down the beach. The rains still came in drizzles, and the wind was pretty persistent, but we kept on going. We found some chairs and decided to camp our buns for a while and read our books. This was short lived. The beach itself is federal property; the chairs are not. A security guard kicked us out of the chairs.

Hey, look! I found a beach babe!

We headed back to our shuttle by way of Avenida 5 and popped in a shop or two to see if there was any little trinket we could pick up. We came away with something, but not on purpose. Liz and I were walking in this one large shop and I glanced over and saw a sign that said: “Break it you buy it.” Immediately after seeing this, I hear a crash behind me: my wife had just careened into some ceramic bells. One had fallen and she picked it up and carried it with her until we were ready to leave the store. Thinking that the clerks had forgotten about my wife’s little “oopsie,” I motioned for us to leave. As soon as we stepped out, a kind, little old man followed and confronted Liz about the bell. She showed it to him; it was cracked. We shelled out 43 pesos ($3.50) and grumbled our way home. After exiting the shuttle, we went to read on our beach. After a little swim in the pools, dinner consisted of homemade quesadillas and some take-out chips and salsa from Frida’s. We then wound down with the movie In and Out. Classic Nineties fare.