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It was late March in 2001. I was fairly freshly single and not in any particular hurry to find someone to be in a solid relationship with. About a month earlier my friend Tom had called and he had asked if I woud be interested in going to Mexico. Since I was in the midst of going through some pretty heavy duty shit in my life I really hadn't given it much thought. But then something snapped in me.
I just decided is it was time to see some of the things I had been missing. It was time to get back to the roots of what the real Dan was about. In the past he was a man of adventure and exploration. Well the time had come for that to return to his spirit. I took the money I had saved up for an engagement ring for my most recent ex-girlfriend and was going to put it to a better use. With that money I ended up traveling to a number of different countries, the first of which was Mexico. So, Spur of the moment I called my friend Tom and said lets go. I walked into my roomate's room and informed him that he was going to be taking a break from his usually insane workaholic schedule to go to Mexico. Tom called some of his buddies and within an hour a simple trip to Mexico had become a multi-state, 8 person assault on North America's nether regions. Our group was to be 8 people from 4 different cities and 2 different states. And 4 of these people were fraternity brothers. They were friends of Tom's from college. Tom had been a friend of mine since grade school. Lee (my roomate) had also been a friend of mine since grade school. So, together this group was already starting out with an interesting dynamic. Somehow I ended up becoming the planner for this mass of mayhem and melee. I guess its because I found a travel agent the quickest. Well, I booked flights and All-Inclusive hotel packages for all 8 people. There were people coming from 2 different cities in Florida and 2 different cities in New York. The travel agent was dangerously close to reaching through the phone receiver and strangleing me before the end of this whole mess. But the deal was done. It was all planned and now all we had to do is wait until it was time to depart. If you read back a few lines. you'll notice I used the term All-Inclusive hotel package. If you are unfamiliar with that term let me explain.... All-Inclusive hotel package: A travel package that includes your hotel accomodations as well as all the food you can eat and all the drinks you can drink with all the entertainment in the hotel included for one price. Which translates to a riotous booze fest..... The day rolled around to when it was time to embark on the journey. I got home from work around 9pm and decided that I should probably do a little packing. Since we were being picked up by car service at about 6am, I was going to get roughly zero hours of sleep. Tom called at about midnight to say he was about half-way done packing. He said that he included a Mexico Survival Kit in his luggage. The Mexico Survival Kit will be refered to as a MSK from this point forward. Writer's note: Tom is a pharmacist. Imagine if you will what a pharmacist might include in an MSK...Oh, and by the way the fraternity that Tom belonged to in college was the pharmacist's fraternity. So, his fraternity brothers that were joining us were all pharmacists also. Lee called about 11pm and informed me that he just leaving work.(like I said workaholic) At about 12:10am Lee arrived home from work. We bullshitted for a few minutes and then I went back to packing. I really only began packing a few minutes earlier anyway and hadn't gotten too far. I really hate packing, its the worst part of traveling. I had suggested to Lee that he start packing also. But he needed to unwind from work. So, at about 2am I had finished packing and made a few calls in to Tom to see where he was at. I stopped downstairs to see if Lee had begun packing yet. He was passed out flat on the couch. (his typical place of repose) He hadn't even packed one item yet. I figured I'd let him sleep and wake him up in the early in the morning to pack. Then I crashed for about 3 hours. I woke up and headed down for some breakfast. Lee was still on the couch passed out in the exact same postion that he was in when I left last night (earlier this morning). I checked his pulse, to make sure he was still alive, he was so, I woke him up. He said, "Yo man, what time is it?" I replied, "about 5am." He said, " Foooock , I have to pack." Then Lee went upstairs to go pack. I ate and ran upstairs to go shower. After I was down showering I yelled in to Lee to let him know that the bathroom was free. There was no answer. I yelled in again. Still no answer. I knocked on Lee's door, the door swung open and Lee was on his bed fast asleep. I spoke loudly, "Lee, wake up man, you gotta pack!" He woke, and said, "Shit, what time is it?" I said, "About 5:30am" He said, "I'm gonna jump in the shower, then I'll be awake enough to pack, oh and by the way, fuck you Neuburg!" He then jumped in the shower long enough to get wet and ran toward packing. In 20 minutes he was "showered", packed and we were in the cab heading to JFK. We got there plenty early and went smoothly through check-in. Luckily I had received my passport that week. My passport's proverbial ink was still wet, but it worked well enough for me to cross the border. We went through check-in and there was no site of Tom's friends from Queens. We thought to ourselves, "Fuck'em we have our tickets and the rooms in Mexico are already paid for." With no site of them, we boarded the plane. About ten minutes after the plane was supposed to have left, an announcement came over the intercom. "ATTENTION passengers, we will be departing shortly, the last few passengers have finally arrived and we are stowing their bags now." Then we saw those sorry suckas walking on. We knew it was them. This would set the tone for the whole trip. We arrived in Texas for our change over and we left the plane to look for Tom. Tom was going to meet us in Texas. We found Tom and headed straight for the bar. Writer's note: We had a few rounds, it was now about 10:30AM. And suddenly we realized that someone had confused the boarding time with the take-off time for our next flight..... So, the pilot of our flight strolled up to us at the bar and said in a casual voice, "Do you fellas think you'll be joining us on the flight anytime soon?" We all repied through a slight morning buzz, "Sure thing, Boss!" We boarded the plane, having delayed the second leg of our flight as well as the first and immediately took off. As we began to come down for approach, we realized that Mexico is a poverty striken, third world, dirt hut covered toilet. We were praying that the crap we saw below us was not where we were going to land. Groups of twenty obvious residents would come streaming out 4'X4' thatch huts as we flew over. We thought my travel agent had screwed us! But luckily there is a wire fence marking a dividing point and once you fly over that you come to the Americanized slightly non-third world section of tourist Mexico. Now I am all for roughing it and doing adventure travel. But the only roughing that I was interested in for this particular trip was having to swim and extra two feet up to the pool bar to get a Pina Colada. The ground crews escorted some cows and chickens off of the runway and we landed safely in Mexico. We got off the plane and ran into Joel. Joel was the final piece of the puzzle. The last one to join our motley crew of sketchy individuals. We mosied over to the bagage claim to collect our things. There is where I took first glance of the only goat driven bagage claim conveyor belt. It worked quite efficiently I must say. Pulling our bags off of the belt and handing a few pellets of alphalfa to the goats we pressed on towards the "Taxi" He took us exactly where we wanted to go. The Beach Palace, of the Palace Resorts. Upon entering the hotel we were greeted warmly and began the arduous "Checking in without speaking spanish" task. Luckily for us, Joel is a self proclaimed wetback and he was able to translate. We got our rooms and 10 minutes later I was the first to slap my New York whitened skin into the light blue tint of the ocean, which was about 30 feet off of the back patio of our hotel. About 5 minutes after that, I was the third one of our group to have an ice cold margarita in my hand. Only Lee and Joel were able to achieve "Drink in the Hand" status before me and damn it I deserved that status. The planning was a pain in the arse and the travel took its toll, especially having not had much sleep. See next installment of my life to see what happened in Mexico |