Home again

Sunset over the Pacific in Mazatlan.

My wife and I arrived home at 2 a.m. this morning (thanks American Airlines!) from Mazatlan, Mexico, where we spent the last week pre-celebrating joint milestone birthdays.

Of course you can ask. We’re going to be fifty – me next week and she in mid-December. 

We had a swell time. We always do whenever we travel and we’ve visited something like forty countries. Mazatlan is – make that was – the third destination we’ve visited in Mexico, which ranks in the top three of all the countries we’ve visited. 

What, you ask, did we do in Mexico? Visit ruins? Go deep-sea fishing? Check out the museums? Take Spanish lessons? None of the above. We hung out around the largest of the three massive swimming pools of our resort. Granted, we have a pool in our own backyard but … it doesn’t have a swim-up bar, we can't summon a waiter named Jesus to bring us shrimp cocktails or club sandwiches whenever we’re hungry, and there are no attendants handing out fluffy towels, adjusting our pool umbrella or asking if we’d like to sign up for massages in the spa. (Yes, thank you. Swedish for her, deep-tissue for me.)

OK, you caught me. We’ll be fifty-five. Yes, both of us – our birthdays are twenty-nine days apart. It’s kind of nice being married to someone who is almost exactly my age because we remember the same songs, the same TV shows, the same events. For example, we had both just completed second grade the summer Neil Armstrong took his one giant step for mankind.

I brought three books but finished them all by the end of the third day. Stupidly, I left my Kindle at home so I couldn’t download any. I suppose I could have downloaded a book to my cell phone but my 55-year-old eyes can’t read type that small. Besides, I’m embarrassed to take out my phone in public. It’s an iPhone 3 which identifies me as a dinosaur. It’s five years old, refuses to die and, by God, I’m not going to get a new one until it does. It was fascinating and disturbing to see young couples by the pool or in restaurants who were so busy interacting with their cell phones they didn't even look at each other. 

The gift shop was out of books in English except for “The Martian” which I read on my last trip to Mexico. Luckily there was a wicker basket atop the counter of one of the swim-up bars where guests can leave paperbacks they don't want to carry home for other guests to read. The day we arrived, I saw a Larry McMurtry cowboy novel.

I’m not generally fond of novels  – I’m a non-fiction kind of guy – but, sometimes, they’re ok, especially on vacation. But the McMurtry book, when I went to retrieve it, was gone. The basket contained nothing but some novel (I assume it was a novel) in a language that, for all I knew, was Bulgarian, along with half a dozen Harlequin and Silhouette romance novels which, I learned because I read two of them in four hours, taking care to fold the covers over so nobody could see what I was reading, are written for women with the IQs of deer ticks. Both the romances I read were about women in powerful jobs, one a world-famous designer, the other a country music superstar. Both, it turned out, secretly hated their glamorous jobs and yearned for nothing more than the simple, honest men they had left behind when they struck out for fame and fortune.  Once reunited with the turgid members -- a term used in both books that made me laugh out loud -- of the men they had been yearning for all along, they ditched their careers and settled into domesticity. Every woman’s dream.

By the time I finished those books, someone had deposited a Tom Clancy novel in the basket but, unfortunately, he didn’t write it. It was based on an idea he had and he licensed the writing to someone who, apparently, didn’t work with an editor. For example, a character in Africa calls someone in California. The Californian announces that it’s 7 p.m. and he is just about to leave the office. The African caller says it’s 10 a.m. where he is. What’s wrong with that picture? 

All right, dammit. We’re going to be sixty. Are you happy now?

More entertaining than the books was the time we spent observing our fellow guests – almost all of them American. It is amazing how badly people behave when they are on vacation, how much they drink and what they wear. Trump proposed a wall to keep Mexicans out. If I were the president of Mexico, I’d put up a wall to keep over-served Americans wearing tank tops out of my beautiful country.

The only other thing of note I did was to eat good food and lots of it. The scales informed me this morning I gained five pounds in one week. I’m surprised that’s all. Our resort offered an all-inclusive package, all the food and drink we could consume for a mere $120 per person per day. I had no intention of buying the all-inclusive package but, as our arrival date approached, the hotel started sending emails and calling every other day and the price kept dropping. By the time it fell to $61 per person (the senior rate, same as the child’s rate), I decided it was too good a deal to pass up.

I should have.  Not only did I feel compelled to eat and drink everything in sight because it was “free,” I could have done so for a lot less than $61 because the dollar is at all-time high against the peso. An enormous buffet breakfast including a chef making made-to-order omelets is $15. A club sandwich, fries and Pacifco beer brought to your lounge chair by a uniformed waiter is $12. A steak with a salad, dessert and a couple of glasses of wine is $25.

Whatever, we’re back home now. My wife is still in bed. I’m sitting by the pool drinking coffee I had to -- horrors -- make myself. In a few minutes the kennel will open so I can go pick up Bonnie and Billy Ray, our elderly dachshunds who, together, are almost half our age. 

Look, asshole, it’s none of your f-----g business, OK? Do I go around asking your personal information? No, I don’t. I have better manners than that. I’d think you would too.

Home again and tonight we’ll have a new president-elect half the country will despise.

I wanna go back to Mexico. Maybe for the next four years.