Cancun-Day 1

Well, we are finally back from our most recent vacation and I have to say, it was the one that Dan and I were looking forward to the most--we weren't disappointed!

My sister did a day-by-day blog about the trip and I liked the idea since we have so many pictures.

We took a redeye flight out of Salt Lake at 12:30am Thursday morning, then flew into Atlanta, GA for a layover and then from Atlanta we flew to Cancun, Mexico. My sister, Lisa, had reserved a rental car for us so we picked it up and headed down to the Tulum ruins to get in some sightseeing before checking into our hotel. Surprisingly, neither Dan nor I was as tired as we expected after trying to sleep on a plane and only managing about 2 hours total. We stopped for lunch in Playa Del Carmen and had a very authentic Mexican meal before heading to the ruins.

We hired a Mormon guide named Ruth who was very knowledgeable about the symbology of the time period and gave us a lot of background on the history of Tulum, which was a strictly religious set of buildings that only the priests lived in. The main population of Mayans lived further inland away from the shore where there was more fresh water.




Here's some more pictures of the ruins.
It was well worth the trip down just to see the ruins. I was glad that Lisa and Cody had been to the area before so they knew all the places that would be fun to see. Dan had never seen ruins like Tulum before and I've only seen the Copan ruins in Honduras so it was neat to see the remains of an ancient society from the Yucatan Pennisula.

After Tulum, we drove back to Cancun and checked into our hotel. My brother-in-law, Cody, was able to get us sweet hotel rooms in the Westin because of his business credit card. It was on the southern end of the hotel zone in Cancun and we had all sort of free perks such as huge rooms on the 1st floor with terraces and views like this every day.

Here is the view of our terrace looking towards the room.