CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

Cruise Escape — Final Episode

So — the snobs had got­ten us with their refusal to let us in — we must stay here … how DARE they refuse us!

But now we had to get back to the ship.  Luck­ily, think­ing ahead back in the last reel, I’d made a deal with the dri­ver to get us back to the

– he had waited around for us and we quickly made our escape.

He raced back to the ship — we were mak­ing head­way.  Strangely, he dropped us off near what amounted to a con­struc­tion site — we’d have to go the long way — or just straight through the site.  Well, since it’s Mex­ico, and they have no real rules — we just walked right through the con­struc­tion site.  “Hiya, Juan, nice hard­hat — not, it’s ok, we’re just walk­ing through — crazy grin­gos — just ignore us.”

We were back at the pier.  We waved briefly at our friends at infor­ma­tion and leaped mas­ter­fully onto the ten­der boat.  The mis­sion was afoot.

As we had planned, Kathy headed back to the state­room (that’s ship lan­guage for “room”) — and did the final pack­ing while I went to the Pursor’s Desk (that’s ship lan­guage for “front desk”).  I walked up, it was 2pm.

“We’re leav­ing.”

“I’m sorry — what?”

“So long, adios, we’re leav­ing.  Thanks.”

“You mean right now?  Here?  Is this the first you’re telling us of this?”

Uh oh.

“Umm.. yes?”

“Oh — it would have been bet­ter if you’d told us with all the other peo­ple in the morning.”

Snob says (inside my head), “If I’d known I had a place worth going this morn­ing, I’d have told you.”

Mouth says, “Oh, I’m sorry — will that be a problem?”

“No — I don’t think so, but it will cost you $32 per per­son — that is not our fee, it is the Port Authority’s fee to leave.”

From there, we did the Pass­port dance for about 45 min­utes.  She called a very help­ful man, who I later learned was the port liai­son for the cruise line.  He began the hec­tic run­ning back and forth to get our paper­work done.

Mean­while, occa­sion­ally, Eliz­a­betha (our Pur­sor friend) was replaced by a vari­ety of Idiota — (that’s ship lan­guage for morons).  These peo­ple would come up, not notice that I’d been there for about 45 min­utes, and begin a con­ver­sa­tion with me that basi­cally went some­thing like this:

“Are you being helped?”

“Yes — Eliz­a­betha is help­ing me.  We’re leaving.”

“Oh.  Right now?  Is this the first we’ve heard about it?”

…and so on…

In the midst of this, Kathy and I had to heat up our bankcards to get cash over and over for all the var­i­ous sundry things that needed to hap­pen.  It was then that I real­ized I might have made a dread­ful mistake.

Reach­ing for my pri­mary cell­phone (not to be con­fused with my more expen­sive and basi­cally use­less sec­ondary iPhone (use­less for me — all you civil­ians in the audi­ence should totally buy an iPhone — you’ll love it)) — I dialed my banker, Matt — I had to leave a message.

“Matt, we’re headed to a hotel right now and I need to make sure I have enough cash — I know we made aosit recently — please ensure that we have enough clear cash in the account to cover my upcom­ing costs — they’re gonna be a bit high, my friend.”

Maybe 10 min­utes later — I notice (no ring or any­thing — I’m in Mex­ico) that I’ve got a message.

“Mal­colm, it’s Matt.  The check hasn’t even arrived yet, so I can’t autho­rize the funds — what’s going on?”

Uh oh.

Think, think, think.  The last thing I want to do is leave the ship, get to our new snob haven, and have our card be denied — how dread­ful.

Just keep mov­ing — keep going… the hero in the movie never stops in the mid­dle just because his gun has jammed…

“Mr. Mead?  We’ve con­tacted the Port Author­ity — they should have your papers ready by 5pm.”

“That’s cut­ting it a lit­tle close, isn’t it?  The ship leaves at 5:30, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Mead — the ship will wait here for you.”

Ahhh — I love stop­ping the itin­er­ary of a mas­sive, multi-ton ves­sel and the lives of thou­sands of peo­ple so that I can mod­ify my vaca­tion… time to go get a bite in the cafe­te­ria … I mean “din­ing room.”  I got a plate of some sort of gourmet burger or slop or some­thing.  I tried to reach Matt again… he answered.

“Matt — I gotta make sure I have the money…  [insert story about going to Palmilla here] … so now you know why I have to be able to ensure the money’s in place.”

He laughed with me, “yeah — that’d suck.  Well — the bro­ker­age account backs up the check­ing, so you’ll be ok.  Have a great trip.”

“Cool… thanks.”

I fin­ished off my Arnold Palmer (that’s ice tea and lemon­ade) and went to find Kathy.

The bags were packed — so we went and sat in the lounge wait­ing for them to come back with our papers.

We waited.

…and waited.

…and waited.

It was 5pm — peo­ple were com­ing back in droves, by the hundreds.

To pass the time, I chat­ted with Eliz­a­betha about how bad the trip was:

“Why did you want to leave, Mr. Mead?”

“Oh — I don’t want to say any­thing … but well — it seems kind of like the staff is exhausted, you know?  Like every­one is over­worked and it’s com­ing through in the qual­ity of the trip.  Could that be true?”

She looked at me very dead­pan and replied, “I can’t respond to that, Mr. Mead.”

At that moment, I knew that, yes, the staff is exhausted and over­worked and its affect­ing the qual­ity of their cruises on Royal Caribbean.

While we were hav­ing that con­ver­sa­tion — a very nice woman came up and asked if they were going to get around to remov­ing the raw sewage that had flowed into everyone’s rooms on her hall.  They admit­ted that they were work­ing on it — and it would take a while.  She was very polite — described it as black water — and well … it didn’t get pret­tier from there.

I told her we had vacated our state­room, so maybe she (and the other 6 affected rooms) moved into our old room.  It felt like a con­fir­ma­tion of sorts.

Finally, our man came back.

He told us he would meet us at the ten­der boat, we dashed off to get our bags.  I asked for some­one to be sent.  Eliz­a­betha promised that a woman (we’ll call her Juanita) would come to take our bags.

I was con­cerned that we had too many bags for a girl porter — didn’t want to be sex­ist or any­thing — but well — it’s a lot of bags.  But to be cor­dial, in this day and age — I kept my mouth shut.

Juanita appeared in our State­room about 10 min­utes later (5:10) to take our bags.  To make sure she could do it — she brought some extra equip­ment.  His name was Car­los or some­thing — he was a large man.  I guess Juanita was in charge of feed­ing him or some­thing.  She never touched a bag.

As we got to the ten­der boat, it felt like we were head­ing out through the in door.  There were hun­dreds of peo­ple com­ing in on the last boat, we couldn’t even get to the check­out because of the crowds.  By the way — if you ever want to smug­gle some­thing into Mex­ico, go on a cruise and leave in the mid­dle.  I think a guy waved at us from across the room to check our bags.

Once we were out of the ship, and onto the ramps to the ten­der boat — it was a lit­tle sur­real.  Here was the mas­sive moo­ing crowd of tourists mak­ing their way up the ramps to the ship, while Mr. and Mrs. Snob, their bag­gage sherpa and her trained mus­cle all rolled down to enter the ten­der boat alone.

On the pier, our man, the port liai­son gave us our papers and our bags — waved to us, and headed off.

Here’s his picture:

As the ship sailed off with­out us, we grabbed our bags — ran the gaunt­let of hawk­ers around the marina (who seemed to avoid us this time, as if our bags and our expres­sions promised cer­tain death on approach) — got to the cab and headed to Palmilla for real.

As we drove there, I took this fleet­ing pic­ture of our ship leav­ing — buh bye Royal Caribbean — give our love to the sewage spill.

Cruise Escape — Chapter 3

…So we headed for the hotel on the other side of the marina.

As I drew my sword and bat­tled off the Cohiba sales­men on my left, Kathy deftly pulled out her ninja stars and was able to dev­ert wave after wave of unre­lent­ing offers for cab rides and tours.  We fought hard, and the exhaus­tion wore on us.  By the time we’d reached the halfway mark near the “swim with the dol­phins” (ride, museum, aquar­ium?), my arms were aching from the raw war and car­nage of cut­ting through so many ad hoc ven­dors… I was ready to give up, but then I looked over at the steely resolve in my wife’s eyes as she wiped her blade clean on the shirt of another fallen foe, and some­how, I just knew we’d make it to the other side.

She grabbed my by my shirt col­lar, pulled me back to my feet and yelled, “Come ON, you wants some of this?  Bring it!” as she pulled a pair of belt-fed 50-caliber machine guns from her back and blew a firey path across the pier.  Weep­ing uncon­trol­lably, I fol­lowed her wake and some­how, by sheer willpower and car­toon lev­els of weaponry — we made to the hotel in one piece.

Ok, actu­ally, it was just annoy­ing, but we made it with­out spend­ing anything.

So … we walked into the hotel lobby, and the nice man at the desk got us a taxi for about $30 to go to both of the hotels we were going to check (the one with the com­pli­cated rules had been taken off our list sum­mar­ily — we didn’t have time for all that garbage).

We hopped in the van (most of the taxis in Cabo are vans, actu­ally) and away we went.

The first place we stopped was Esper­anza … which looked pretty nice. They had been expect­ing us — so as we approached, I made a deal with the dri­ver — if he’d hang around here and the next stop and then drive us back to Cabo, I’d give him $60 — he thought that was fine and in we went.

To approach Esper­anza, you had to go through two guarded gates. The first was for the res­i­dences area, that sur­rounded the resort, the sec­ond was for the resort.

But when we arrived — it was very quiet … too quiet.

We were shown around to the rooms, and our guide explained that they had nice deals going on.  The room was very nice, it had a pri­vate pool, etc. etc. … and it was gen­er­ally … nice.

But when we got back to the main recep­tion (which was actu­ally a kind of cool “out­door room” com­plete with desks), there was only one non-staff per­son lin­ger­ing around.  I chat­ted him up.

“Kinda quiet, huh?”, I said.

“Well, yeah — it’s all like this … I’m the only guest, or it feels that way.”

“Oh.”

Our guide promised us that they had just been filled for a wed­ding — but yes, right now it was quiet.  No swine flu here — it’s great.

I think Kathy and I both actu­ally believed her, but we wanted to check the other place.  So, com­edy aside, I’d stay at Esperanza.

We hopped into our wait­ing cab and headed to Palmilla.

We were pretty sure we would stay at Esper­anza — but we were doing due dili­gence… that’s all.

We rolled up to Palmilla, to the stan­dard guarded gate …

…and they stopped us.  Cold.

“Do you have a reservation?”

The dri­ver tried to explain the sit­u­a­tion — but they greeted that with icy chill­i­ness.  What’s this?  We’re being stopped at the gate?

I waited a few more moments — then leaned for­ward to explain to this man that I am the Snob, I will crush him with my sneers — do you know who I am? (I’m not actu­ally any­body — but I can def­i­nitely play one on TV).

“I am very sorry sir, but this is a very pri­vate club.  We can­not just let you in.”

I have to admit — this was fun.  I was going to socially engi­neer my way into an exclu­sive resort.

“We called and spoke with reser­va­tions (you dolt), and they told us to come and see what you have to offer.  We have dri­ven 35 min­utes from Cabo to see what­ever tri­fles you have — and now you are stop­ping us at the gate?”

“Sir, what is your name so I can look up your reservation?”

…ah, I had him — clearly he was con­fused and was ask­ing ques­tions that obvi­ously couldn’t apply…

“How can I have a reser­va­tion if I haven’t seen your lit­tle rooms yet?  What are you talk­ing about?”

Now for the flank­ing maneu­ver — I used my own phone to call reser­va­tions at the Palmilla.

“Hello — Palmilla — how may I direct your call?”

Acti­vate semi-peeved cor­dial voice, “I am being stopped at your gate — put me in touch with some­one who can repair that, please.”

“I will trans­fer you now.”

“Hello — reser­va­tions — Mr. Mead — we don’t have a reser­va­tion for you.”

Nice counter-move.  Not only were they aware of the sit­u­a­tion at the gate — they had my name already.  For the record, I really did speak to some­one who said come to the resort and they’ll show us a room.

“I was told by some­one that you would show us a room and we would decide whether to stay here or Esperanza.”

Now, here’s the cool part…

“Mr. Mead — my name is Jorge … I am a man­ager in sales — the con­cern is that we have been doing some work with the media… and we’ve wanted to keep it quiet… I’m sure you’ll be able to enter now…”

…and as he said that, as those words left his lips, the gate opened and the guard waved us through.

Jorge met us at the entrance — every­one was very nice — and he walked us around.  We apol­o­gized for the con­fu­sion, which he waved away and demanded we accept his apolo­gies.  He walked us to a nice Junior Suite, with a pri­vate pool over­look­ing the sea and told us they were doing some pro­mo­tions as well — wouldn’t we please stay?”

At that point, I was pulled in two direc­tions.  One direc­tion was less than enthu­si­as­tic with the chilly gate maneu­ver — the other direc­tion was pleased with the recovery.

We opted to stay.

Return­ing to our dri­ver, we headed back to the last chap­ter of our adven­ture — get­ting off the boat with all our bags…

…to be con­tin­ued one more time…

Cruise Escape — Chapter 2

If you haven’t read it yet, you should prob­a­bly read Chap­ter 1 of this saga first.

Ok — so we left off that we were ready to leave the boat and find some­place nice.  We decided to stop off at the “busi­ness cen­ter” on the boat first and look for decent places.  I took the key­board (because I type really fast) and we were in and out of the com­puter within about 10 min­utes — so we only paid about $5 or so to find the names of a few possibilities.

Armed with that list, we headed to the ten­der boats, which are lit­tle boats that leave the ship from a

hole in the side.  They were filled with all the peo­ple from the ship, but nobody knew we were actu­ally plot­ting a bold getaway.

I’ll tell you this — the ship looks pretty huge from the waterline.

In any event, we rode the lit­tle ten­der boat (seats a mere 50 peo­ple or s0) to the shore, and shoul­dered our way to the pier.

Once we were there, we strode right up to the infor­ma­tion desk and I (well, the Snob, I guess) said, “We are look­ing to spend the most money we can on the best place there is.”

The guy turned to his friend, turned back to me and said, “You want the One and Only — Palmilla.”

Not nec­es­sar­ily trust­ing this guy yet, we also pointed out our web-search results, many of which were nice enough — none of which was the Palmilla (which, I pre­sume, is above list­ing itself under the Google words “lux­ury” and so forth).

We had a few oth­ers, includ­ing some­thing like a Sher­a­ton — which the man on the pier shot down with­out even break­ing stride.  We’d called it already and had less than per­fect results, so we threw it over­board right away.

The other two they listed were Ven­tanos and Esper­anza.  We got phone num­bers from these amaz­ing infor­ma­tion peo­ple (mind you, this was like a kiosk on a pier — how these guys knew what to say is beyond me — but I want to take a moment of silence to honor them greatly for their expertise).

Next MacGuyver move was to get to a phone, since even though my phone was wel­com­ing me to Mex­ico, I couldn’t fig­ure out how to place calls.  It told me to just dial the num­ber directly — but when I tried that, I got some span­ish woman say­ing either, “I’m sorry the call you have placed did not go through.” or pos­si­bly “You stu­pid Amer­i­can, I’m charg­ing you $100 for that mis­take.”  I’ll find out later, I guess.

So as we wan­dered between all the grabby “entre­pre­neurs” at the pier, a guy stand­ing by a semi-reputable look­ing tour shed asked if we needed any help.  We said (quite fool­ishly, you’d think) “Garsh, we’re lookin’ to get us to some lux­ury hotels, but we need to call them first, mis­ter.  What should we do?”

As the man’s pupils tight­ened, and his smile warmed, he looked up the num­bers on his iPhone (yes, it was an iPhone — stu­pid Apple gets another point) and showed me how to dial my sad lit­tle Palm for Mex­i­can numbers.

We called all three — each one started by putting us through to reser­va­tions.  Ven­tanos was the first to fall.

I spoke with them and they said they had rooms, at a pretty high price per night, but the fourth night was free, etc. etc.  But it was so com­pli­cated that we shot them in the face first — game over.  Could be a nice place — but no way were we going to deal with all that dur­ing this high­wire act.

Next call was Esper­anza.  They said they had avail­abil­ity — the rooms were less money, and even with­out a dis­count — tal­lied up to a lower over­all fee (which wasn’t dif­fi­cult if you think about it).  I told them we’d be by in a lit­tle while to check the place out — they said great, they’d be wait­ing for us.

Finally, I called Palmilla, they had com­pa­ra­ble prices to Esper­anza, and said they did have avail­abil­ity.  I told them we’d likely come by to look at rooms, and they said fine.  So we had two tar­gets, and even though you know the results — the adven­ture continues.

Next we had to find a cab… on a Mex­i­can pier near a cruise ship.  Acti­vate exter­nal bris­tle, dis­play gri­mace, poker-face set to stun.

“Amigo — you need a cab?  Where are you going?”

“My friend, are you headed into town?  I can help you?  My friend?”

…and so on.

Well — even though I knew he had smelled blood, I fig­ured we owed this guy a shot, so we went to find him again (we’d wan­dered a few feet away).  Even­tu­ally, we found him, which should have elicited some sort of sense of com­mit­ment between us, wouldn’t you think?  But he blew it.

“We need a driver.”

“Oh, well — you see — I have tour guides, not taxis.  A taxi would charge you at least $75 to take you out to those places — and then $75 to get you back … I just don’t know what to tell you, my friend.”

I once read in a spy book some­where that “my friend” is almost the equiv­a­lent of call­ing some­one a bad part of the anatomy — I was begin­ning to under­stand what they meant.

(Poor lit­tle busi­ness­man, do you know who I am?  I am not impressed with your local nego­ti­a­tion kung-fu)

“Well, that’s too much money.”

Long pause — see­ing that his opener of blam­ing the high bid on the taxi-drivers has been deflected by my deft use of blunt candor.

“Oh, my friend.  Well — I could pos­si­bly do it for some­thing like that — but likely, with my dri­vers, it would cost more.  My dri­vers are all tour guides — the other dri­vers don’t even speak Eng­lish.  With us you’d be able to ask ques­tions and learn things too.”

I struck back with the lowball.

“How far would fifty bucks get us?”

Huge pause.  Clearly, I was slip­ping through his fin­gers — which wasn’t really what I was hop­ing for, but bet­ter than pay­ing some­thing egregious.

“Oh, I could not even do it for less than $60 each way.”

Now — I loves me a good spar­ring match.  I mean, part of me wanted to stay and have that guy throw­ing in a Mex­i­can taco lunch and t-shirts — but I real­ized we were on a mis­sion.  So I pulled the plug — giv­ing him the option to stop the walk-away.

“Nope, sorry my friend.  Too expen­sive.  See ya.”  — and we walked away, with him just star­ing at our backs.

We headed back to our mys­te­ri­ously pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion desk friends (we learned dur­ing this re-visit that one of them had actu­ally worked at Palmilla — which says something).

I asked him what we should do about get­ting a cab, espe­cially since we were headed to such expen­sive places.

He sug­gested we walk all the way around the marina to the hotel on the far side — which had posted prices and would get us a cab with­out issue.  It’s the tiny build­ing on the far side of the water.

So off we headed to the hotel…

to be continued…

Cruise Escape — Chapter 1

Our first inkling that this might not be the vaca­tion for us came when we went to the “big open­ing” show.  This would be the show that wel­comes you aboard, after the first for­mal dinner.

Now, in a show like this — you expect a silly revue — the kind with that kitschy fun that goes over­board with “jazz hands” and basi­cally knows that it’s being slightly dorky.  This revue, how­ever, didn’t accom­plish that.  At all.  It was disturbing.

Imag­ine that you were watch­ing the cast from The Office and it was them doing the dance — but it wasn’t the actual actors (which would be amaz­ingly awe­some), it was the char­ac­ters (which would be painfully embarass­ing).  Now, imag­ine that you aren’t safely in your home, laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally at the awk­ward­ness of the entire thing, but instead are sit­ting in a the­ater, in your best dress-up clothes, watch­ing peo­ple do “sad hands” — the pain was unbear­able.  Kathy opted to leave… so we did.

The evening was res­cued to some degree because the exit to the grand the­ater opened into the casino area.  We weren’t at all inter­ested in the casino area, but there was a piano bar with a flam­ing queen (shout out to Hillary) who was so hys­ter­i­cal, he’d drawn a stand­ing room only crowd into the bar (includ­ing kids).  He had us all par­tic­i­pat­ing in “Joy to the World” with our own hand ges­tures, and if you didn’t do the ges­tures, he brought you up to the front of the piano and made you a cheer-leader, which entailed fac­ing the crowd wear­ing a boa.  It was really silly and a lot of fun … he likely saved the evening.

But, as these things go — the flame ebbed quickly and the jokes became slightly repet­i­tive (he really was funny, though) — and when he had the whole crowd sing the Star Span­gled Ban­ner so he’d have time to go to the bath­room, we left — thor­oughly entertained.

How­ever, we had that gnaw­ing feel­ing that this wasn’t going well.

Cue the next morn­ing, our first port day.  Kathy’d already got­ten up to go grab break­fast, when I woke up to the wail­ing tones of a small child next door scream­ing, “I don’t waaaanaaaa” over and over again.  Joy.

The Snob would have none of this — and imme­di­ately came up with the idea to leave the ship.  I agreed with my alter-ego and began to con­sider how to raise the ques­tion with my wife.

I headed up to break­fast with the other 300 peo­ple who were wan­der­ing around in their t-shirts and flip-flops, and sought out my wife.  Casu­ally clutch­ing my plate of military-grade scram­bled eggs and fes­ter­ing bacon, I sat down with her at the table.  She’d secured it with her bag, but some “neigh­bor” had got­ten con­fused by the inter­na­tional sign for “this table is taken” and had put his juice down on the table to reserve it as well.  We ignored him and took the table any­way.  He came up to chal­lenge us briefly, but some­thing in our demeanor com­mu­ni­cated that he was out of his league — so he moved on.  Shoo, lit­tle Mallmer­i­can — we’re hav­ing break­fast. (I hereby claim all rights and priv­i­leges to the word “Mallmerican”).

Like a ner­vous boy on his first date, I made my move — I sug­gested that maybe we might con­sider leav­ing?  Like most of the girls I dated when I was a ner­vous boy, Kathy’s response was, “No!  Absolutely not!”

Unlike the scarred child deep within my heart — I pressed for­ward any­way (shout out to all women every­where who have ever been heart­less girls who glibly said no to a ner­vous boy).  Unde­terred, I pointed out some of the evi­dent flaws in our trip.

There was the fact that it was like a mall — com­plete with nightmare-inducing wall art — and that even she was gen­er­ally peeved:

Look closely at that wall-art.  Yes, that man­nequin is a lit­tle boy (seem­ingly fright­ened) fly­ing away hold­ing bal­loons.  Boys and girls, if you don’t behave, you might fly off the boat — sweet dreams.

So, it was enough to con­vince her that we needed to escape — but only on the sup­po­si­tion that if we couldn’t find a place eas­ily, we’d come back and endur– enjoy our­selves whole­heart­edly.  I agreed and we were off to the races.

(to be continued…)

The Big Reveal

So, being that it’s our 15th Anniver­sary, that means crys­tal or glass.  Kathy and I both agreed to just skip it on the gifts — but then I found some­thing — a neck­lace.  Here’s a picture:

It’s 2,000 year old Roman glass from the Holy Land.  The color goes nicely with her eyes.

(It’s a lit­tle hard to see, but the glass are the square blue beads between the sil­ver squares.  Yes, I have the documentation)