Tag cancun

Merry Christmas, Cube Abandoners!
We hope the year ahead is as stunning, rich, and full as the year behind us soon will be. With warm moments spent with friends and family, and a life that fills full and happy.

2013 was a transition year for ATC. We traveled quite a bit in the USA, our motherland, but only traveled abroad twice, to our northern and southern neighbors. 2013 saw our first trip to Cancun, Mexico, and stunning winter visit to Niagara Falls, Canada. You can find a whole album of trip pics from Cancun in the gallery!

Inside the USA we traveled from Michigan to the east coast, then straight across the nation stopping in Nashville (go country music!) to Memphis (where we met soul singer Al Green) to the Presidential Library in Arkansas, to Oklahoma (where the world’s largest McDonald’s is) and on to Colorado (where the Garden of the Gods was a big attraction) to Utah, Idaho and then Oregon (go ducks!) and on to Washington state, where we were saturated in a light but constant drizzle.

After a few weeks in Washington we did the trip in reverse along the northern route, hitting the long stretch across Montana and the fun sites of South Dakota (Rushmore, Wall Drug and Corn Palace) and then on to visit family in Minnesota, Illinois and then out to the coast again. A full circular tour of the motherland, and a wonderful one.

Michael and Lauren also got married this year in the southern USA. Thank you to all our lovely friends and family who traveled from around the planet to be in, and attend our nuptials. It means the world to us that you came from around the blue planet to be at our humble event.

Now we’re in North Carolina, situated in the Piedmont area between the mountains and the ocean. You’ll find us outside with our daughter or inside, writing this blog and gazing at maps as we plan future adventures.

With the new year dawning, we have some exciting plans for travel within the USA. This massive country has so much to offer, so many amazing national parks, sites and of course splattered across the USA there is one of the largest of everything imaginable, from frying pans to balls of twine…and we want to see them all.

We hope your holidays are full of joy and fun!
Merry Christmas, from Abandon the Cube!

That’s right, we just spent eight days in Cancun. While I did originally think that Cancun would be a ghost town in summer (100-degree weather and high humidity) it was packed. Cancun was lovely and temperate and exactly the tropical vacation I was hoping it would be.

This was my first time to the Caribbean (not associated with a cruise ship, anyway) and I was impressed with every aspect of the pre-fab vaca. We stayed at the RIU palace las Americas on the hotel strip. One interesting factoid about the Cancun hotel strip is that in the 70’s there was nothing out there. It was a bit too swampy to build on.  A local told us that some Las Vegas investor came down, saw the land and had the idea to buy it, develop it for plumbing, wiring, etc and then sell plots to high-end hotels. I guess this guy is a multi-millionare now for having the vision.  Anyways, it was neat to imagine it untouched. The RIU Palace where we stayed was out on a point and, after walking much of the beach from end-to-end, we found it had about the nicest swimming area and a stunning outcrop of rocks where exotic, tropical fish liked to linger. I’d recommend the RIU. It was all-inclusive for 180 a person per day, which made it expensive for us but worth it because restaurants in the area are about USD30 a person per meal. The front-desk staff are horrible but everyone else on staff were fantastic.

After three days at the all-inclusive we rented a condo for the remaining 5 days in downtown Cancun. The condo was 70USD a day and slept ten people (we only had four). This is what I’d do in the future as it was cheap and closer to cheap food and real Cancun.

From the condo we headed out to see chichen itza, a Myan city-center worshiping the snake, whom they saw as the go-between for the underworld (where we all came from) and earth (where we temporarily live). The tower itself is a fantastic display of human engineering and had a lot of neat features, like the number of steps equaled stuff on their calendar, etc. When we arrived it started to thunder and soon lightening appeared over the tower. This hit home the idea of how many people were sacrificed there.

We also went to one of the famous sink holes. Reportedly, they would throw people into these as sacrifices as well. The snake (and all life) issued from these holes so it made sense to toss in sacrifices to please the origin of life. Anyways, we swam in them and it was hard not imagine hundreds of bodies trapped 150-feet down just reaching up at your toes.

We also stopped at a replica Mayan village (read: tourist trap). This was one of those annoying things tour groups do and is one of the main reasons I always avoid tours. This time we decided to go with a tour only because the roads were reportedly unsafe to drive on. They were fine. Next time, we’ll drive!

Now that you have the overview of our trip, I’ll post more in-depth blogs about each day!

I have a trip to Cancun coming up. I haven’t flown in a while and I’m really sick of how airlines are trying to make an extra buck by charging for luggage. And if they don’t do these they limit you to a specific weight allowance. Trying to get it right on the nose using a bathroom scale is pointless. I always go over. So, I bought a little mobile luggage scale. Now when I’m in Cancun and have a suitcase full of whatever I won’t have to guess at what 25lbs feels like. I bought THIS scale.

I tried it. It’s lightweight, which is good because once I weigh my bag I have to zip this sucker in with the other luggage to make sure I have it for the return flight weigh-in. The features are standard, but the cool thing is can display in either kg or lb. Now I won’t have to do any conversions in my head (which is good, because I can’t). A lot of product neglect this detail. It seems like a simple thing but I once heard that NASA was doing a project with the international space station and neglected to convert all their work into metric so the satellite shot off into the neatherregions of space. Even geniuses forget the little details are sometimes the most important.

My only complaint is it has an odd battery size. So, if it runs out of juice in Cancun I won’t be able to find a better to replace the one it has. On the other hand, I could just bring extra batteries.

I’ll write more about how the luggage weight worked out when we try it out on our Cancun trip.