The Five Beach Trip : Part III

The final installment of our Mexico trip. And I even included pictures!!

There is a single strip of land with a single road, lined by hotels on both sides, that is the touristy part of Cancun. There’s a bus system that is conveniently easy to figure out, even if you’re completely blitzed, since there’s just the one road. You go left or you go right. Done. It’s also cheap – I’m not really sure how much, but if you give the bus driver paper money, you get coins back. Just like in the Shel Silverstein poem.

We wanted to go to the Hard Rock for dinner. Now, I know that the coolness of the Hard Rock ended like twenty years ago, but my kids wanted to see it just the same. They have such fond memories of the only other time we’ve been because it was with Dick and Sara and there was a Marilyn Manson video playing. Abby totally remembers that part. We’d already ridden left from our hotel, and weren’t sure if the Hard Rock was more left or back towards our hotel, to the right. We got on a bus that took us more left, after much discussion and a coin toss.

After a few minutes, the hotels started to thin out a bit and fewer and fewer people got on the bus, though people continued to get off. Soon, nobody was getting on. At this point, I was ready to call it a night, give up on the Hard Rock, and go back to the hotel for the buffet that we’d already paid for anyway.

Also, it was completely dark outside, and the countryside seemed to be giving way to dense jungle, though in retrospect, that was probably just my overactive imagination. I thought I heard music, the kind of music that plays during the opening credits for a horror movie. I was 100% sure that at any moment, the driver’s head would swivel completely around, his face twisted in a maniacal grimace, while he cackled ominously, “Spanish Spanish Spanish Muerta Spanish Spanish more Spanish.” I knew that word – muerta – and it wasn’t good.

When the last couple stood up to get off the bus, I leapt to my feet and started whisper-yelling to my kids, “GET OFF RIGHT NOW! GET OFF THE BUS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” We stepped onto the curb, and as the bus pulled away, I realized that perhaps we’d only gone from one horror movie into another. Or maybe we’d just thickened the plot, so to speak.

This section of the street was very, very dark and there was no bus stop in sight, other than the one where we were standing. I figured there’d be a corresponding stop on the other side of the street, going the other way, but I figured wrong. Several years ago, Cancun was hit by a hurricane that did a lot of damage to the hotels and it appeared that we chose to disembark from Horror Movie Bus into an area that had not been revitalized after the storm. Indeed, the buildings were all abandoned, dark, and ridiculously creepy. The windows had been either broken out or boosted, the guard booths stood empty and foreboding at end of cracked and overgrown driveways. Certainly there were ghosts and murderers just waiting to snatch us as we dashed by. I gathered my children together and said, in my Mom-est Mom voice, “We’re going to walk quickly, very, very quickly, to the next bus stop. If you dilly dally, you will probably die. And not by my hands, because I will be running 1000 miles per hour in the opposite direction when the ghosts and murderers grab you from behind. Now, hook up.”

In our family, “hook up” has a slightly different connotation than the one you’re perhaps used to. Ever since I passed the two-kid mark, and my hands were outnumbered by amount of children I had to manage, I let it be known that if any kid wanted to not get lost, it was up to them to find a handhold and hang on for dear life. Zach likes to hook a finger in my belt loop and Abby will grab my purse strap. Or Spen grabs my hand, and Rachel grabs his other one, as long as somehow, they’re all connected to me. It’s a policy that’s served us well on our travels – Sea World, Santa Barbara, the lights at Temple Square on the Friday night after Thanksgiving, etc. When we’re moving through a crowd, or at a quick clip, I call out “Hook-up!!” and everyone knows it’s time to hang on or prepare to set up a permanent residence at Shamu stadium or the corner of South Temple and Main, wherever we happen to be. Maybe someday I’ll call out “Hook-up” and someone will mistake it for an invitation. If that ever happens, I’ll totally blog about it.

Anyway, we half-ran for what felt like miles and miles, but came to no bus stops. I was pretty panicky by now, I didn’t know how far we had to go until we hit hotels with live people in them and Spen was showing signs of exhaustion. Or else the alcohol was kicking in. Just kidding, he hadn't had any that day. Either way, I knew that if I ended up carrying him, we were done for. He outweighs Rachel, who is nearly three years older. Finally, a bus going in the direction we were heading pulled to a stop next to us, though there was no official stop. He seemed very puzzled to see us there, perhaps because he’d never heard of someone making it off the Bus to the Jungle of Death, much less successfully walking through the Hotels of Doom Alley. I don’t know what he said, but he let us on the bus and, as thanks, I threw a considerable amount of money at him as we rushed to our seats. There was one other couple on the bus and they were nearly struck dumb at the sight of us. Almost immediately they fired off several questions, asking me if all those kids were mine, and was I here alone, with all those kids, and why were we walking where there were no stops, with all those kids, and did I need a stiff drink? After that, they lapsed into stunned silence and just stared at us for the rest of the ride.

Awkward.

We made it to the Hard Rock and had a nice dinner, though Abby lamented not having Uncle Dick and Aunt Sara along, as Dick is the musical one in the family (sorry, Dad) and Sara is the artistic one and what goes better at Hard Rock than music and art? Spen liked that meal more than all the others we had, and kept asking to go back for the rest of the trip. So if nothing else, at least I’m exposing my children to other cultures.