Can You Cancun?

Late Thursday night, Dan and I returned from a family trip to Cancun, Mexico. All in all, it was a fabulous trip. But unfortunately while I was there, I sustained a few injuries. We spent half a day on a canopy tour that included more than a mile of ziplines and swimming in a cenote, or sink hole. For the most part I was fine on the ziplines, and despite banging my leg on the first platform, I even rode one of the ziplines hanging upside down. At the cenote there was also a zipline of sorts that would carry you out into the middle of the water where you could let go and fall in. At one point, I tried to dive in and instead nailed the belly flop. If only I were more graceful, my dive would have looked like the one my brother-in-law is doing in the picture below.


On a separate trip, I got a bug in my eye. It wasn't as exotic or scary as one might think. A tiny bug crawled into my eye, and my eye turned bright red from the irritation. Lucky for me, my dad was smart enough to pull the skin around my eye down. Once he discovered the bug, he got it out for me and my eye returned to normal. So there won't be any grotesque photos of my eye on the internet.

Finally the worst thing that happened to me was that I came home fatter than I was at the beginning of the summer before I started exercising regularly. When I left for Cancun, I was in pretty good shape, but I guess I brought some of Mexico home with me. While I'm sure the greasy food didn't help, next time I'll have to be more careful about all those virgin strawberry daiquiris.


But like I said, the trip wasn't all bad and had several highlights, including the lucha libre masks I found at a mall in the hotel zone. Originally I thought about buying a mask for a friend who loves Nacho Libre, but my siblings and I had so much fun trying it on, that I decided I'd better keep it. The entertainment we got out of it was well worth the few bucks I paid for it.

I also had a personal breakthrough in the field of snorkeling. The thought of looking around underwater in the ocean has always scared me. I prefer not to know what is swimming in the ocean with me. When I was about five, I remember finding a National Geographic magazine at my grandparents' house filled with underwater pictures of sharks and shipwrecks. For the better part of an hour, I would open the magazine to one of those pictures and will myself to stare at it until I would slam it shut in a panic.

But Dan likes to snorkel, so I've been trying to give it a shot. While in Cancun, we went to a park called Xel-ha. In the park is an inlet of ocean water that's been stocked with fish and separated from the rest of the ocean with a bridge that prevents rough waves. Most of the area is between 4 and 8 feet deep, so I knew that I could stand up and run away if I got really panicked. And it helped to have several of my sisters with me who are also new to the snorkeling scene. I always feel safer in a group. After I had seen a few pretty fish here and there, my mom showed me a cove where there were hundreds of fish milling about near some steps that led out of the water. Apparently the fish like that area because just a few feet beyond the steps is a fish food dispenser. My brother and little sister had a blast throwing food at the fish, and underwater it was fun to watch the fish swarm around the food. Even though I was a bit creeped out by all the fish, I was staying on the outer edge of the fish and doing okay until my darling 16-year-old brother threw some fish food at my head. That's when I almost walked on water. So, yeah, it was a good time.