My husband and I are now in Mexico, on Isla Mujeres, an island near Cancun. Christmas Eve sucked, all but my sister's presence and the delicious lasagna she made. My brother and Dad were a-holes. Won't go into it all, but I did sort of scold/shame them a bit for it. It pissed us off so much that we left early. My sister was happy to, as well. Many things there confirmed that our move away was not a bad idea.

Christmas Day sucked even more. Our flight was a little delayed, and then when we arrived everyone arriving from multiple flights stood for nearly 3 hours in customs (hundreds) like cattle. At one point, the operators of most of the customs lanes left to go to lunch. After almost an hour, people were going to the see-through windowed room where they ate gesticulating to them to come back. A woman with a dog was begging them to let her take the dog outside, I guess to pee. I worried that someone might pass out. When we FINALLY got through, after the customs staff returned, and managed to get our car, we found we missed the last ferry to the island. The ferry company stopped running early because of the holiday. En route, we had to drive through flooding roads, since it had been raining so much. We also had to find a different hotel for the night (with no refund for the one we booked). The emergency hotel sucked and charged a premium for a holiday and last minute stay.

We finally got to the hotel we originally booked around lunch time, today. Fortunately, this one is quite nice. It still rained most of the day, though, but tomorrow is supposed to have better weather. It is nice enjoying 72°F (22°C) weather after frigid temps in NJ and Czech Rep! It should hopefully get even warmer this week, in the low 80s.

We had a delicious lunch here today, but I realized, after-the-fact, that we were overcharged a lot for the meal I ordered. I'll just not go there again and be more careful from this point on. Too late and too much stress to go back and fight over it. They also set us up to make that hard.

It's too early to make any absolute judgements about Mexico (or at least this part), but so far we think we'd recommend Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru (where we've also visited in the past) a hundred times more for anyone wishing to see a Spanish-speaking country in the Americas.