We have a room with a balcony.
I can lie on the bed and stare at the sea.
Oh, such reveries.
On the one hand, we went from home to here in a day.
On the other hand, it took a full day to get here.
Pretty much everything that happened in getting here was my fault. We woke up this morning and I didn’t really have a good sense of our timeline. So I took a little too long in getting out of the house, just like I took a little too long last night in finishing my packing and cleaning.
We were going to use a park-and-ride lot, but there wasn’t enough time for that. It didn’t seem a problem at all until my lovely bride said “Drop me off at the terminal so I can check in our bag, go park and I’ll meet you inside.” So we’re calling audibles.
I did that. Dropped her off, got the checked bag out of the trunk, and then headed to the garage. At our airport, a large and old and tired and almost grimy feeling place, you have to then drive all the way around to get back to the parking garages. Each terminal has it’s own garage. Hopefully I parked in the right area. It’s a big place. A lot of driving. A lot of signs and lanes and it’s dark and, thank goodness not yet busy on the roads around the giant facility.
The roads weren’t busy because everyone was inside.
The Yankee has taken part in the TSA financial shakedown program. I pass through the security theater the old-fashioned way. The signs say I’m 41-45 minutes from security. The line goes around the corner, around another corner and halfway down a long, long hall. The doors close on my plane in 49 minutes. Thankfully, the blue shirts have a mandate to keep it moving when things back up. In times like these your shoes and your belt aren’t so scary and the best people are looking at the X-ray machines, so your devices don’t have to come out bags. Best of all, you just go through the old metal detector and not the slower back scatter machine.
They kept it moving. I made it through security in 30 minutes. That meant it was time to run.
So I ran.
The door on the jetway was closed, but only because the gate agent has to close it behind her when she goes down to do her count. She let us on the plane, easy as you please. In fact, another family came down after us.
We flew to Detroit without incident. From Detroit to Cancun I watched The Boys in the Boat — what if Disney did a movie about rowing crew during the Great Depression and then showed the kids from Washington beating the Übermensch in their home waters in Berlin, and what if all of the aters, Washington and Berlin, were actually English? Because it is a long flight, I also watched The Courier — what if Benedict Cumberbatch was a Cold War-era business man recruited to do a bit of spying for her majesty? Both based on true stories. Both good plane films. I’d probably watch The Courier again first.
Into Cancun without incident. Through customs in record time. That process has really changed. Take a picture, march on in. We walked by all sorts of customs and passport control booths and tables waiting for someone to say “Senor! Senora!” but they did not. We might not even be here, technically.
The Yankee had arranged a private shuttle to our resort on Playa del Carmen, and now we are here. Nice sprawling place, too. It is raining and windy. We are here to dive, starting tomorrow. In the last several days, though, a tropical storm has formed in this area. It has moved on, across the peninsula and heading west-northwest or so, but there’s still a lot of energy in the air.
But then when I sleep
Oh such reveries
