We flew Sunwing; arriving at 0230 hours on Monday morning.
Because there was no free wi-fi available (and no availability of internet pre-paid cards) I did not keep a daily blog but am writing this from notes I kept during our time there.
Our first night (the night we arrived) was very short as we got to sleep at 0400. Our first opinion of the room was that it was in desperate need of upgrades.
Our opinion of the beach was, WOW!!. The beach was very nice and although there weren't a huge number of palapas there were beach umbrellas that were placed by hotel beach staff in a spot requested by the hotel guests. My mistake the first day was to not put on sunscreen and think that by staying under the umbrella I was protected by the sun...NOPE!!.... I got terrible sunburn that impacted me the whole week. Caro was much smarter and used sunscreen protection right from the beginning!
We spent the vast majority of late mornings and afternoons under umbrellas or palapas (if we were lucky enough to score one) enjoying reading and/or listening to podcasts.
The Cuban government controls the internet and as such it is necessary to buy internet cards and log-in to wi-fi with these (which turned out to be area specific-i.e. time left on a card I bought later in the week at the hotel did not work in the airport). With no cards available by Tuesday (day two) I decided to turn on cellular data in order to text the kids to let them know we were OK. Turns out they were worried about us not contacting them so this was a good move.
On Wednesday we walked over to the hotel next door (Tuxpan) and were able to buy two internet cards. They cost the equivalent of one US dollar each and give you one hour of wi-fi. With that we were in text message contact with the kids for the remainder of the vacation. I rationed my use of wi-fi until late in the trip when our hotel had cards to sell. I was not surfing the net too much but was using to download podcasts.
We had three long walks including one to the city of Varadero (probably six kilometres) and many beach walks.
The food was better than we remembered from our two previous trips to Cuba. This hotel was 3.5 stars and in the past we would not have considered it for Cuba trips. This time we found the food very appetizing and you can tell that Cuba has spent much time and effort to improve their quality and quantity. Caro enjoyed a meal one day eating an unfortunate cousin of Bugs Bunny! I really enjoyed the pasta (made to order).
We had three nights in the specialty restaurants and enjoyed them immensely. They were Italian, Mediterranean and Cuban.
Our breakfast was always enjoyable as we had a great lady (Cecilia) to make our eggs. She got the most tips of anyone of the hotel staff and Caro enjoyed their (very) brief conversations as the eggs were frying.
The weather ranged from extremely hot (the first two days) to stormy and cloudy (the third and fourth days) to windy, but nice for the last few days. Even the lousy days were much nicer than the weather at home!
We started the week thinking we had made a poor rash decision; not only in coming so soon after our south American trip (only one month in between trips) but the choice of hotel however by the end of our time we were both extremely happy and came back home with feeling of time and money well spent. This trip is probably the first where we didn't do a tremendous amount of walking or go on side trips (money was a consideration on that point as we are doing a lot this year).
Our trip home was an all nighter and because our hotel checkout was at noon and the Sunwing bus picked us up at midnight we decided to pay $ C75 to keep our room until 10 PM (money well spent).
Dad picked us up at 0800 on Monday morning (Lisa had dropped us off at the airport when we left).
A wonderful week!
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