Mexico
When your pops says, "It's been a while since we vacationed, so let's spend the weekend in Mexico", you agree and start looking at flights. This was the first trip in a long time where I did absolutely no research beforehand. My agenda for the weekend only included swimming, drinking, and eating - the rest would figure itself out.
The swimming included the gulf and the pools and a few cenotes. Cenotes are sorta like the clear and always-cool springs we have here in Florida, except down there they have caves with stalagmites and we have manatees.
The drinking was a given considering my little brother turned 18 the day I landed, so he spent the weekend legally drinking as much as possible before he had to go back to Chicago and wait three long years. Also legal in Mexico - Cuban cigars. Those went down like all cigars, starting off strong but quickly getting tiresome and gross before carefully putting them out because your sure you'll try again tomorrow. Yeah, right.
I couldn't tell you what I ate for most of the meals. The food was fantastic, but most of it was local and just slightly different than what I was used to. That's melon but this kind of melon you've never heard of, that side is actually a cactus and you're supposed to eat the seeds, those mushrooms only grow next to or on corn stalks. I asked what I was eating and someone told me, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the names of my meals.
We ate, we drank, we swam, and we even made our way to a Mayan temple. We're all just getting older and busier so a weekend in another country spending time with family was a nice change of pace. We're already planning the next trip.
The only downside to the weekend was the flight back when someone flooded customs at Orlando International Airport causing a 3-hour delay on the way home, but I turned those lemons in to lemonade by getting this dumb face on the local news.
