Sunday- Our flight to O'Hare and then to Mexico were on time - big shocker for the O'Hare segment since that airport has a bad track record with me and I'm sure everyone else. If I can avoid it, I will fly somewhere else for the connection, but this was the cheapest and best timed flight. Luckily it worked well and we were in Mexico a few minutes earlier than anticipated! I was a little dehydrated from the flight, it was just 4 hours, but I have to make myself drink water sometimes even though I don't feel thirsty. I was fine once we were outside of customs in the air-conditioned airport and changed into a short-sleeved shirt. We exchanged dollars for pesos in the airport. They had a horrible exchange rate but we only exchanged a little bit so we had some pesos in our pocket to pay the taxi driver to get to our hotel. The receiving area of the airport was CRAZY. There were tons of tour shuttles, people with signs, people trying to book you on a tour shuttle, etc. just to get you to your hotel. The economy of Puerto Vallarta, and I am sure most of the beachy Mexican cities, center around tourism so they try very hard to sell anything they can to us vulnerable and gullible Americans/Canadians. We were able to get a taxi and were brought to the Sheraton Buganvilias Resort. The hotel was AMAZING. After a whole week of seeing many, many resorts, my parents' timeshare is by far the best on the strip. The location is wonderful too. It is in walking distance to the Malecon, the downtown strip where tourists go every day.
Here is a picture of the hotel zone- looking north from the hotel and away from the Malecon:
We stayed at the hotel to eat at one of their 5 restaurants. We ate at the Italian one. We asked for a table on the beach and not under the tent. Here's a picture of us at the restaurant with the lanterns/tent behind us. Matt ordered a mango martini which was so good! I thought I didn't like mango.
We went to bed soon after that because we were exhausted from our flights. But before we went to bed our hotel was having some fiesta and there were fireworks that we could see from our hotel room. What a nice way to end the night!
Monday- It's our 2nd anniversary today!!! To celebrate, we decided to attend the timeshare presentation in our hotel. Because we were guests of owners (my parents) and not the actual owners we were invited to it almost the minute we checked in on Sunday. How nice (said sarcastically). But we did go because we get to have a free brunch under the HUGE palapa (a thatched hut) and discounts to 3 or 4 things we wanted to do including half off the fiesta, and discounts on ziplining, restaurants and massages. We also got some free drink tickets to the swim up bars. It was definitely worth it. The salesperson didn't push us much probably because we were a young couple and everyone else was retired or older and really looking to buy. We honestly told the guy we were not going to buy and he let us go on our way.
Here's a picture of the palapa where we had brunch:
We took a bus to Walmart to buy provisions for the week such as tons of water and breakfast food and snacks. We have a kitchenette in our condo/room so we could store things in the fridge and use the stove or microwave if we needed to.
Ok to really celebrate our anniversary we decided to go exploring in the city and then finish the day at a restaurant for dinner. We walked on the famous touristy Malecon, which is only a 10-15 min walk from our hotel.
A view of the Malecon:
A cute Mexican family feeding birds in a town square:
A beautiful church in the middle of small shops and narrow roads:
The rest of Monday to be continued!
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