Over Thanksgiving we took a 8 day family vacation to Cancun, Mexico. We took about 400 photos, but don’t worry I won’t be posting them all. I do have a photo gallery that will include all of the photos, including ones that I won’t have in my blog posts. You can find that photo gallery for this blog post here.
We left for our trip the Monday before Thanksgiving and the kids were so sad to have to miss a few days of school. Okay, not really, but I sure regretted it when we got home. Blake and Andrew had a lot of work to catch up on as well as trimester exams the week we returned. Our flight was direct from Detroit to Cancun and left at 12:30pm so we didn’t have to be to the airport until 9:30am, which was nice.
I sat on the plane with the other Dramamine takers…
And across the aisle sat the non-motion sickness prone…
The flight was about 3.5 hours long and went pretty smoothly for the most part. I read Bared to You so the time flew by. I started using my FlipCam on the airplane and thought I was going to make this awesome vlog when we got back from vacation. However I have to admit my kids are not the Shaytards. They don’t like being videotaped and they definitely don’t “put on a show” that makes them full of entertainment. If anything they shut down when I start recording. Oh well, at least I can take photos and you can’t hear them objecting!
After arriving at the airport we got through customs pretty easily, changed into some shorts, and went to look for our scheduled transportation to our resort. I have to laugh and share how Ken allowed himself to be stopped by the time-share schemers at the airport. He was convinced they were there to help us, but I knew from all my review reading that they were there specifically to talk you into booking excursions from them or attending their time-share meetings. Even when they did pretend to tell us where to catch our van to our resort they gave us the wrong information. Finally I got Ken away from the guy and we found our van. It was about a 20 minute drive to our resort, the Crown Paradise Club.
The infinity pool at our resort was pretty sweet. (notice the clouds, the weather was cloudy the first two days.)
The room itself, not so much. I didn’t like the family suite at all. When you walked in the door you either went up the stairs to our room, or down the stairs to the kids room. We each had our own separate bathrooms, but the kids only had a shower and if you had the curtain even slightly out of place the floor would flood. I thought our floor had a balcony, but it didn’t. The kids had doors that walked right out to grass and a patio, but birds crapped all over everything so you couldn’t really sit out there. Not that you would want to because the view was the worst. You could see the ocean in the far distance, but right in front of you was the kids play area- the waterslides, the soccer field, zip line, etc. One might think, how awesome, there is so much for the kids to do right outside your room, but our kids did not use the amenities at all! Chase and Karli went to the kids club once for like an hour and they hated it so they never went back. I don’t know why they didn’t want to participate in any of the other activities. They just liked to hang with us all the time I guess. I’m not complaining though- they never got bored just hanging out by the pool and eating endless snacks, especially ice cream. The resort was all inclusive so they were able to eat whatever they want at no extra cost. More than anything Chase and Karli enjoyed painting these ceramics and they ended up doing this activity three different days!
Don’t think for a minute we didn’t enjoy our trip, we had a fabulous time. I just wanted to give an honest review of the resort. I wouldn’t go back there or recommend it to anyone. It was not very clean, the food was mostly cold and very bland, and the hotel staff were not very helpful- you had to figure out most things on your own. That is the last time you will read a complaint though- the kids loved the vacation and it’s not like you spend that much time in your hotel room.
The kids loved hanging out at the beach and we spent time there every day. There were parts of the beach that had a high cliff that they loved playing on. Or there were other parts where you could walk right into the ocean. It was perfect. The first two days were really cloudy and we actually got nervous about the weather, but after the third day the weather was in the low 80’s and beautiful bright sunshine every day.
The second night we took a bus about 15 minutes from our hotel to do some shopping at La Isla Mall. We ended up having dinner at Baby Lobster only because when we were walking by the waiter told Ken to stop here for dinner and if we don’t love it- it’s free. The food was great and the kids loved our waiter Andy even more. Karli had asked for cheese for her French fries and since they didn’t have any our waiter went somewhere (another restaurant there maybe?) to get some.
We walked around the mall and took tons of crazy photos. There are all these guys dressed up in different characters that you can get your photo taken with. As you can tell if you look at all the photos – Chase loved get his picture taken more than anyone else. Don’t forget you can see many more photos from our first two days here.
Days 3 – 5 Post Here
Days 6 & 7 Post Here
