Mexi-Beasleys - a post by Brannan

At long last, our international travels have resumed!  We recently took an awesome trip to Mexico, specifically the Yucatan Peninsula, which is like the Florida of Mexico (as I understand it).

Pictured: fortnight vacation perfection

Two weeks was just about perfect, we were able to see and do just about everything we wanted, (SPOILER ALERT) with the exception of Merida, which we felt like we could just move to.

We flew into Cancun, the spring break capital of the world, which meant that we immediately left Cancun because that's not really our thing.  I think we made the right choice.

This is our thing...

SOOOOOOOO NOT our thing

Right away we knew we'd made the right choice.  Isla Mujeres, like most islands, is way laid back, calm, and small.  The entire downtown is walkable in 10 minutes, and the food was amazing.  This part of Mexico is justifiably world famous, Europeans especially love it!  As a result, on our first night there we ate amazing authentic italian food on outdoor tables on the street, to the sweet dulcet tones of wandering mariachi bands.  Ahhhh just like Rome...mostly.  It was a cool experience though, one of those real "We're in a foreign country!" wake-up moments.

The next day we woke up, had a delicious mexican breakfast (rice, beans, tortillas, salsa), and booked a snorkel tour.  Had to get into the water!  On the way to the snorkel sites, we passed this marvelous vessel:

Yarrrrr - there she blows!

Of course I suggested that we should board and take her as she was probably manned by landlubbers, and asked that Melanie call me "Admiral Brannan", but we had some awesome, unphotographical snorkeling to do.  The water was amazingly clear, and our first site was the underwater museum, which is a 1/2 mile square where the decision was made to sink a bunch of concrete statues of people in like 30 ft of water, like so:

Hmmmmm

It was a really long swim, and kinda strange, but we did see a sea turtle, which is always AWESOME!  and afterwards they took us to a resort beach, where our captain and snorkel leader prepared us some delicious fresh fried fish.  Afterwards we went to the lighthouse drift site, which was much more to our liking.  The water was only approx. 10 ft deep, and the coral was awesome.  It was really interesting because the boat dropped us off and the current just carried us along over top of the coral, no swimming involved!  We saw huge grouper and barracuda (3-4ft long, huge suckers!) and I was more interested in chasing them than they were in us.  The drift ended up around the lighthouse, with all sorts of fish in the corals.  Afterwards we wandered around the island, eventually ending up at the beautiful North Beach around sunset.

Not to bad for a January 21st!