COVID INTERRUPTUS

We left Florida, where it was in the low 50s, on Sunday morning, January 8th headed to Mexico. A few hours later, we landed in Cancun where it was 80 degrees. John did his due diligence on car rentals at the Cancun airport and Enterprise/National had the best reviews and he’s here to tell you the experience was better than most others. After getting the car, we drove to a condo near the small town of Puerto Morelos, Mexico. We’re about 4 km outside of town on the Caribbean Sea: the sun is shining, the clouds are beautiful, the breeze is blowing…and we are recovering from Covid!

We hadn’t previously made any arrangement for the first two weeks of January, so back in Florida Nancy went on the offensive to try and locate a place to stay somewhere in either Mexico or the Caribbean islands. It’s moderately difficult at this time of year to find any place decent…everyone has booked the great places long ago. But Nancy has a skill at sniffing out underappreciated places. If you check our Itinerary, we say that our first place in Mexico is at Isla Mujeres (the Isle of the Women), but we’re not scheduled there until January 24th. So, we had an opening from January 8th to the 23rd. She found a place that had no reviews; not usually a place we’d consider. But we already had plane tickets for Sunday January 8th to Cancun and a car rental starting the same day, so we gave this place a closer look and finally booked it at 4:30 AM the morning we were leaving! (The executive “we” really means Nancy since who else gets up that early?)

Pictures from the deck of our condo outside Puerto Morelos, Mexico

Since we have been to this area a few times, we knew our way around. So, we spent the first day gathering groceries at our favorite local grocery store and took a ride to Sam’s Club in Playa del Carmen because we knew they were the only place to buy decent wine (not great, plus we haven’t found a great wine yet).

If you know John, you'll know he likes his Manhattan cocktails. So we were off to find either rye or bourbon. Mexican stores carry very little whiskey or bourbon, mostly scotch. If they have rye its Jack Daniels with flavors (e.g. honey, apple) - not for making a classic Manhattan. We finally found Bullett bourbon and grabbed a bottle and some sweet vermouth. No bitters here in Mexico except for chocolate bitters (but that's another story.)

We got back to the condo and realized, Hey! we've got no cherries. So we headed to the grocery story only to be rebuffed---no maraschino cherries. I know, all of you Manhattan snobs will say, "Oh John, you need Luxardo or Fabbri Amarena cherries, but I'm a Ken Deloplaine Manhattan man. Ken Deloplaine was my late wife Sandy's father. Kenny taught me how to make a Manhattan, Whiskey Sour, Stinger and other classics and Kenny used bright red ice cream topping cherries for his Manhattans. Plus a little of the juice in the drink gives it a nice reddish color.

So Nancy says, "why not Amazon?" We're able to get Amazon shipments most places and as much as we do not like to support Bezos, it does give us access to things we cannot find here. John found what he wanted and ordered it…without taking a good look at the description (as is his SOP). Tomorrow we will receive 5 POUNDS of maraschino cherries! Needless to say, Nancy does not plan on carrying them to our next destination! Thank heavens bitters only come on one size.

On our second day here, Nancy came down with a cough and a slight fever. Way back last September, John gathered up a bunch of Covid test kits the US government had provided. Nancy teased him about bringing so many test kits in his luggage to Italy, but as an old boy scout, he was going to be prepared. These kits were lugged around Italy for three months; he almost tossed them in Florida when packing for Mexico but decided to bring them. Now they came in handy. It took less than a minute for Nancy’s first test to show she had Covid. Johns showed nothing. To be sure we tested her again…same results.

By Wednesday, Nancy spent the entire day asleep with a light fever and a horrible headache. Thursday was no better. John showed no symptoms until late Wednesday afternoon while sitting on our deck overlooking the sea… with a glass of wine. Then he noticed little red spots on his hand. Having had pasta for dinner the night before, he wondered if his Margaritaville lifestyle had caused him to miss washing his hands. No such luck, he licked a finger and tried to remove them…they wouldn’t disappear. The next morning, he awoke with a sore throat. And so it goes (apologies to Mr. Vonnegut). John followed Nancy’s symptoms by two days. Sore throat, headache, slight fever, fatigue, hacking cough, oh yea and red spots. John started this blog last Tuesday, but it wasn’t until today (Monday the 16th) that he felt well enough to continue. Nancy rebounded by Saturday and helped John celebrate his birthday on Sunday.

We are both much better but the red spots remain…could we be regressing to our teen or acne years? Hopefully not!

As we mentioned, our condo is only a short ride from Puerto Morelos, the town we’ve been going to for a while. Puerto was a small fishing village that is slowly becoming a tiny Tulum.

When we first came here the town only had three streets—it’s up to about five now. What attracted us was its laid-back vibe and the feeling that it was family oriented. On warm January evenings grandparents, parents, and kids visited the town square to sit and talk as the kids played. The square reminded us of piazzas in Italy. Since then, the mayor has found all kinds of money to invest in the town (plus giving her husband permission to build a five-story condo on the beach when the zoning regulations say nothing over three stories is allowed.) The town square was turned into a large concrete amphitheater with an open stage. But there are more bench seats, palms, and a nice playground area for the kids. All that work was done during Covid lock down, we watched the live feed while hunkered down in Philly.

A Symbol of Resilience

One unique feature of Puerto Morelos is the lighthouse on the beach near the center of town. As “Atlas Obscura, the Definitive Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders” states, “The first lighthouse dates to 1905, although it seems it was little more than a light atop a metal pole. The second, about 30 feet tall, was built out of cement in almost the same location, right on the beach, in 1946. Painted white with blue trim, this second light was hit by Hurricane Beulah in 1967. The strength of this storm degraded the tower’s foundation, causing its unmissable tilted appearance.”

As we learned, the town built a tall lighthouse back off the beach but kept the tiny titled one as a symbol of their resilience. Kind of a cool story for this funky little town.

One last PM story. Back in 2019 Nancy and John stayed in Akumal, about 70 km south of PM. One day we went to the Cancun airport to pick up two friends (Denise and Lori). On the way back we all were hungry. John was driving so Nancy googled places to eat. Apologies if we’ve told this story before, but we stopped in Puerto Morelos and while John, Denise, and Lori drank a beer and waited for the food, Nancy “chatted up” some guy at the bar about Puerto. This dude loved it in PM but said it was becoming more of a tourist town. Turns out we became some of the tourists that invaded PM, and after we visit Isla Mujeres next week (for three weeks) we’re going back to PM for three weeks.

We’ve decided to not come back to this part of Mexico because of the sargassum. “Sargassum is a brown seaweed that washes onto the shores of some Mexican Caribbean beaches, sometimes in massive amounts, and emits a rotten egg odor as it decomposes. It comes from the Sargasso Sea, far out in the Atlantic Ocean.”[Cancun Sun] -

A close up of the seaweed - a picture of a mass of Sargassum coming into our beach - it lining the beach in front of our condo.

It’s so bad this year (and most years) that the smell, to John, smells like burning insulation. Plus, it’s crappy to walk through to get to the ocean. There are other places with nicer beaches, says Nancy. So next year it’s off to somewhere else. Your guess is as good as mine.

Anyway, thanks for reading our blog. We wish you a great 2023 and health, wealth and happiness.

Buenos Dias,

Nancy and John