Back from vacation

I haven’t blogged that much lately because I’m using twitter a bit more. It’s bad because twitter’s short messages discourage well thought out writing. I’ll try to do a bit better.

We’re back from our 1 week vacation in Cabo San Lucas. Lucas liked to call it Cabo San Me. We met Tracy’s family there and we spent a lot of time in the sun at the pool and on the beach. The great thing about Cabo is the location, it’s less than a 5 hour flight from almost everywhere in the US. While at the airport coming in, we were roped into getting a timeshare presentation in exchange for a bunch of discounts on activities.

The timeshare presentation was actually mildly interesting. I’d never had one before, so it was an experience to learn how they sell it. They had deals from about $15-30k for a 1-2 bedroom unit for a week. Doing a full purchase of the 2br unit would cost over $2 million. The timeshare program was more flexible than I’d realized. You can use it at any of several different properties, you can bank your weeks or take an advance on them. There’s also a full 3rd party timeshare exchange program in case you don’t feel like using those properties. Not that I was really interested. I guess it’s my parents influence that I’d prefer real ownership, though not at that price. Two of the ridiculous things they did in the presentation were to project out the cost of your future vacations with an inflation rate of 6-9% and to charge 15% interest if you financed the purchase.

We took a bunch of pictures and they are at http://tierneychen.shutterfly.com/. We stayed at the Puerto Bonito Blanco and it was pretty nice. Not the nicest hotel around, but all the rooms had ocean views and it was conveniently located. We ate a bunch of local restaurants, Casanova, Alexanders, Mi Casa, Sweet Bistro, Peacocks, Arts and Sushi. Mi Casa had really good carnitas, I had a good sea bass at both Casanova and Peacocks. The prices were a bit more than I expected, probably about comparable to what you’d pay in the US. One thing about the restaurants in Cabo is the different speed of service. They were all extremely slow compared to typical American restaurants. I think every meal out lasted more than an hour and a half.

The whole area was the emptiest I’ve ever seen a tourist town. Several nights there were only 1-2 other parties at the restaurants. It’s a combination of the swine flu aftermath, the economy, and the slow season, but I couldn’t see how any place we went was making money. One of the restaurant owners talked to us a bit and he said that the Mexican government was offering businesses super low interest rate loans so that they could keep people employed for a bit while they suffered through the downturn. Things did seem to be picking up when we were leaving.

We went on a glass bottom boat tour and I played a very bad round of golf at the Cabo San Lucas Country Club(I shot around 120 I’m pretty sure). Lauren didn’t sleep very well and that prevented us from sleeping really well. At the airport on the way home, she had an epic vomit. She must have projectile vomitted 12-16 ounces of curdled milk. It was pretty nasty. Thankfully it didn’t happen in the airplane, so Tracy was able to get something different to wear that didn’t smell.

Good fun all in all. I highly recommend it. I hear they are having great deals on hotel and air. And the location was convenient for everyone that went.