December 27, 2018
This Little Piggy
At the end of yesterday, we were headed out to see what we could find for dinner. I have to say, we are getting horribly spoiled here in the Yucatan with the food we have been eating. Every dinner is a culinary delight and the prices are just unreal (as in unbelievably inexpensive). Last night was no exception.
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We slept well, despite not being in our super over the top resort anymore. The ceiling fan worked well and it was quiet enough outside to leave the screen door open overnight (we are on the second floor). We got up this morning with two goals in mind - one mundane and the other an adventure. First the mundane. Our laundry really really needed to get washed. We have made do with hand washing in the sink, but today we knew we needed to hit a laundry service and get everything clean at the same time. This was a challenge for us with our limited (make that non-existent) Spanish, as we wanted them to wash the load in cold water and not dry it. We got directions from our hotel and walked the few blocks over with our two panniers full of clothes. With a little help from Google Translate, we were able to not only get across our wishes (which they thought were very strange by the looks we received), but also find out the time the clothes would be done and the price! Well, there you go! Happy, and having a couple of hours to kill, we stopped off for a lovely breakfast at a local cafe and then headed to the hardware store. We noticed in many of our rooms that they are equipped with hammock hooks and it occurred to us that we could make use of them to create a clothes line. All we needed was a length of line strong enough to do the job, which we found. Again, we were able to use our limited Spanish to make the purchase of 12 meters and we were in business! Stopping back at our place, we made sure our idea would work, then headed to a park nearby to read while we waited for the laundry to be done. When we picked it up, they had very kindly folded the wet clothes! We put them back into the panniers and took them to our room where we "decorated" our space, then turned the ceiling fan on full blast so it could help with the drying process.
Laundry done, we were able to pack up and walk over to the adventurous part of our day - Cenote Zaci, literally a 10 minute walk from where we are staying. This is an open air cenote, but you still have to climb down to get into the water. We paid the 30 peso fee and went in. There were not too many people there, considering that this is right smack in the middle of town and it was a hot day. We found a place to stash our stuff and, after a little bit of dithering, got into the water. It was so refreshing!!! There are lots of little fish there as well and the water is so clear you can see them swimming around you. We spashed around a bit and Jim enjoyed taking some video with the GoPro (again, can't post anything due to computer issues - sorry!). It was so fantastic to finally get the chance to swim in a cenote, I just can't tell you! We enjoyed watching daredevils jump from way up high into the deep clear waters - not something either of us was interested in trying, but it was fun to watch.
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5 years ago
After a time, we pulled ourselves out of the water and prepared to head out. However, Jim was all of a sudden having issues with his pinky toe. He thought it was maybe the shoes, but he was really limping all of the way out of the cenote and back into town where we stopped at the park for a drink of juice. He pulled his shoe off and the toe was quickly turning purple/blue - yikes! Something was obviously not quite right, but he doesn't remember hitting it or anything painful at all, which is just strange! We limped back to our room where he took some ibuprofen and we had our siesta.
While we were snoozing, we could hear the wind outside our room - it had really picked up and the gusts sounded pretty intense. Glad we weren't out on the bikes today! When we got up, Jim's toe didn't look any better or worse, so we thought we should carefully stroll into town and find some dinner. The original plan was to go down to the other side of town tonight to see their light show, but we were not sure if he would be able to make the trek now. As we came down the street we noticed quite a few people sitting on the curb. I thought perhaps there was an event happening, but then we noticed that the lights in all the stores we passed were off. Street after street until we came to the centre of town was the same thing - yikes! A pretty big power outage! Oddly enough, at our hotel the power had been on when we left, so either we were on the edge of the outage or it just happened as we left. Whatever, there was no power anywhere which meant no dinner - oh no! Not back to peanut butter wraps again!!! Oh the horror!!! We decided to sit in the park and see what happened. Since neither of us had bothered to bring our phones, we don't have any pics to show, but it was pretty interesting sitting in the park in the gathering dusk, watching people mill about. There are a lot of vendors there and many continued to make sales using flashlights as needed to show their wares - these people don't let anything mess up their day!
We had just decided to head back to our room, not wanting to walk the streets in total darkness, when hurray! On came the lights! Everyone in the park let out a yelp of happiness and business quickly returned to normal. We headed over to a restaruant we had spotted earlier and found a table on the sidewalk overlooking all the action. Our dinner (sorry, not pics tonight) was again, exceptional. We finished and stolled back to the hotel. I think we will put off the light show until tomorrow night to give Jim's toe a better chance to recover. In the morning we plan to head off on the bikes to a nearby cenote before coming back into town to catch a college football game (hopefully). It will be our last day here in Valladolid and we want to enjoy it to the fullest. Let's hope that Jim's toe goes along with the program!
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5 years ago
5 years ago