Playa del Carmen, Mexico - Day 4 - Tues. October 25, 2011

We woke up early again this morning and went to the Aventura Restaurant early for coffee, as usual. It was early enough that I was able to capture a pretty sunrise picture.



For breakfast I had an omelet with mushrooms, onions and cheese and Mr. Sassy had Toluqueno style eggs (sin carne), a Mexican breakfast that had eggs with avocado and chili sauce. Both breakfasts were really tasty! I was really happy that they were serving fresh-squeezed watermelon juice today which is beyond delectable. And of course, there is nothing better to enjoy at breakfast in Mexico than fresh fruit (especially pineapple).



We saw Gato Girl again this morning. She was sharpening her claws, I guess preparing for some battle (maybe with us?)



After breakfast, we walked to the reception area.



Inside the reception area, we saw that there was an advisory posted on the bulletin board concerning an approaching hurricane. The advisory said the hurricane is named Rina and is currently in the Atlantic Ocean and headed toward the Yucatan Peninsula. It said the storm was predicted to arrive on Thursday morning. Later in the morning, there was a memo left in our door:



This memo had us very concerned. We were not sure what to do. Should we try to make plans to fly home early? We really didn’t want to do that. There was so much uncertainty about the storm – especially concerning its intensity. As of today, they were predicting a Category 1 storm.

The first thing we did was to get on the computer and do some research about the airline and what their policy is concerning this type of scenario. From what I could gather, in the event of a hurricane, if a passenger needed to change their tickets, they would not be charged the change fee, however, they WOULD be charged any price difference between the price of the new ticket and the old. Knowing that this would be a last minute ticket change, we knew we would be socked with HUNDREDS of dollars of charges to change the 2 tickets, so we decided that unless this was anticipated to be a very bad hurricane, we were most likely going to stay put.

So the next thing we did was to cancel our planned excursions, since there was too much uncertainty about the storm. We had planned a Mexican cooking class on Wednesday and an ATV adventure excursion on Friday. I emailed both proprietors and let them know we would need to cancel and would reschedule for our next visit.



Because of the approaching storm, the skies were a bit overcast today. There was occasional sunshine that would break through, but it was mostly cloudy, which also made the air temperature somewhat cool. Because of this, we didn’t spend much time in the ocean. We spent a lot of time sitting on the beach and also spent some time lounging in our hotel room. Here’s Mr. Sassy half-asleep on one of our hammocks.

For lunch we went back to the hotel restaurant. I had fried shrimp platter which came with a small salad and some rice and Phil had the Mexican platter again. Very tasty!



After hanging at the beach, we went back to our hotel room to shower up. Today, we were greeted by this adorable towel sculpture:



At this point, the weather turned a bit rainy. We headed to happy hour where there were a lot of guests enjoying cocktails. The drink special today was the Mojito (one of my favorite cocktails). Everyone was talking about the approaching hurricane – some people were looking at weather forecasts on their laptops.



Our original plan for dinner was to walk all the way downtown to go to Carboncito’s, but once we started walking, we discovered it was raining too hard (and it was windy), so we changed our plans at ate at a restaurant that was only a couple blocks from our hotel. The restaurant was a seafood restaurant named Baremar and was on our list of highly-recommended restaurants.



The food was incredible. I ordered the coconut shrimp, which came on skewers with a sweet (mango?) sauce, and came with rice. Phil had a salmon dish that he said was delectable. We weren’t super hungry tonight so we passed on the appetizers and dessert. The service was good here, and the atmosphere was modern and appealing.




After dinner, the rain had died down, so we walked down the main drag. It was fairly lively, considering the bad weather, and I took a video as we walked down the street.



We stopped and had gelato and then headed back to the hotel because my sprained foot was really bothering me. We were back in the hotel room by about 9:00 p.m. We were both pretty beat, so we went to bed.