Our First Day

We spent time with Barton, the person that rented us the apartment, and his girlfriend.  He introduced us to the local store owners, whose store is right beside us.

Then we met our neighbors from Michigan, Gene and Tina, who are here for four months. We made plans to go out to dinner with them on Sunday.

We walked into town and checked out the cost of renting bikes, (around 60 pesos a day/bike) for two weeks.

We had no pots or pans to cook with so the owner's son showed up around 7:00pm with some new ones. Now we have a way to start cooking our own meals.

Our Kitchen

Catching up on the News

This morning we found the Choc-Mool school, which we will be starting Monday. It is about a 10 minute walk from our casa. We met with the director and she went over what to expect during our classes. We will have instruction in the morning and some kind of activity in the afternoon. Mexican cooking, crafts, dance lessons, field trips and going to a local restaurant for coffee with the other students. We will speak only Spanish when we are at the school. We took a short written and oral test and found we could certainly use the lessons.

We  asked about where to rent bikes and the director told us we could use two of the bikes from the school. One needed a new tube in the tire and we had that fixed. We now have transportation.

Las bicicletas de la escuela

We ate lunch at a well know seafood restaurant here called "El Camello Jr." where we had ceviche and a mixed fish soup for lunch.

Chevrche mariscos

Sopa de pescado mixto

Off to the supermarket on our bikes.

Tulum Arrival

Nuestra entrada del apartamento

It was a journey getting to Tulum. We left Vermont and flew to Philadelphia. We got on the plane in Philly and the plane had a tire problem. After a two hour delay of sitting on the plane we headed for Cancun, way behind our scheduled arrival time. We quickly went through customs, caught the bus to Playa del Carmen, just before it left the airport!!

At PDC we caught the next bus to Tulum. We walked to Charlie's Restaurant where we were to meet Barton, (person I had been in contact with for the past several months about the rental apartment we would be staying at). No Barton, so logged into the WIFI at the restaurant. Received an email from Barton and his telephone number. Of course, we can't call him so I asked the owner of the restaurant, Charlie, if he would call. The call was made and a plan of getting us to our apartment was made. We had a cerveza and supper.

Then we asked Charlie to call the taxi and tell the driver where we needed to go. We had no address of where we were staying.  We left the restaurant with Charlie and ended up in his car. He told us he felt better driving us there than giving us to some taxi driver. Charlie knew where we were staying and knew Barton.

Charlie took us to the owner of the apartment's house, Anastacio. Charlie left and we got into Anastacio's red Mustang with his son and he took us to the apartment. The apartment is small, but clean and nice. Tomorrow we will deal with everything else.