Vacationing even further from home

December 26, 2021

Vacationing even further from home

We went to Mexico last week, a long-awaited family gathering that has been buoying me through the dark wet fall. (Somebody once described planned vacations to me as "the islands you swim towards" in life, which feels apt.)

With the covid variant surge welling up around us, we considered cancelling, but the prospect of endless variant surges ahead (and the wreckage of multiple cancelled trips already behind us) plus the yearning for sunshine made us go forward. This was a little reckless and irresponsible, but we did it anyway.

There were functionally two parts of our vacation: 1) Travel Nightmare and 2) Vacation Bliss.

Phase one kicked off with a very early trip to the airport, only to discover our flight to LAX was delayed 2.5 hours due to "staffing shortage." This necessitated rebooking of the connecting flight to Puerto Vallarta for an evening flight. We were annoyed, but we seized the opportunity of a long LAX layover to visit family, which was a lovely little gift. After that, though, the whole thing just fell apart. The evening flight was delayed and then cancelled completely, and we were rebooked for a flight BACK TO PORTLAND the following day and THEN a flight to Puerto Vallarta from Portland the day AFTER THAT. We lost two full days of our vacation and spent those days in airports and airplanes. It was maddening and Kafkaesque (we spent one night in an airport hotel in Portland, which was somehow much more frustrating than if we had been in basically any other city), and apparently Alaska Airlines technically owes us nothing for having functionally stolen two days of our lives. (And if you want to send me off on a ranting monologue, ask me how I feel about the "meal vouchers" they give you in the airport.)

But we finally reached phase two and staggered into Sayulita in the evening, two and a half days after we started the journey. Everybody was already there waiting, and the place we booked was decadently lovely. I don't have much to say about it except that it was all the sun-washed lounging interspersed with ocean swimming and chats with family that I could possibly have wished for. And I saw a LOT of humpback whales, to my great joy. And we all tested negative for covid at the end of the trip, so my fear that one or more of us might be stuck in Mexico for weeks did not play out.