Cabo San Lucas - Mexico

I walked off of the airplane on a steep flight of metal stairs and took a breath of the dry desert air. Not much different that the kind you have in Arizona, but I convinced myself that this one had a ting of salt in it. As we boarded a pre-booked shuttle van, I jumped into the back seat, cranked the window open, and turned on some acoustic Bob Marley on my iPod. I packed more than I should have and while watching the shuttle driver load up; I let out a small laugh as I watched him struggle with my bag.  It was an unimpressive ride filled with boring desert landscape that took about thirty minutes. I was worried that I wouldn’t like Cabo San Lucas as much as my group said I would because of the landscape but I promised myself to not pass any judgment until we arrived to our resort, which was located right on the coast.

The shuttle van rolled up to the front of Hacienda Del Mar and I immediately fell in love with Cabo San Lucas. I don’t know if it was the cobblestone driveway, the lush landscape and palm trees, or the view of the beach that did it for me, but I was hooked. For the next seven days, I would walk around the resort exploring the walkways, taking pictures of the creatures, and chowing down on Mexican-American food. It was literally impossible to rip me away from the restaurants. There were at least ten at the Hacienda Hilton resort and they all had a happy hour menu that rotated around the clock. If you timed it right, you could hop from restaurant to restaurant from ten in the morning to six in the afternoon making each happy hour. It was a foodie’s heaven. Iguanas soaked up the sun and raced away from all of the children at the resort. The negative edge pools were heated, but cool enough when you wanted to immerse yourself to take a break from the heat.

I would wake up in the morning to fresh guava and pineapple paired with a mango nectar mimosa. The soft breeze would roll through the windows and fill my lungs with ocean air. Lunch would be a heaping mound of ceviche with salty tortilla chips and a few cool coronas. I would lay in a food coma in the sunshine reading one of the many books I brought with me. Before I would leave Cabo, the many hours of sunshine I soaked up would leave me a dark shade of beige with freckles and blonde streaks in my brown hair. For dinner the table would each order an entrée and pass it around the table. There were too many choices to select just one – so we had a smorgasbord every night. We would let the waiter select a paired wine or drink and we would sit in the moonlight embracing life and indulging in happy conversation. Each one of us stepped on the scale when we returned to America and watched and the number climbed a little higher than when we had left before.