Hola, Gringo

Have you ever taken a trip and at some point early on, find yourself muttering under your breath,
notsmart notsmart notsmart all the while keeping your perma-grin taught enough your lips bond to your gums?
After trudging through the whole airport ordeal, we've made it to the rental car agency in Cancun and are about to wedge our selves into our motor vehicle of choice, a late seventies era,
VW Beetle. With my wife as co-pilot, we make our way south of town toward our Mayan destination, the sleepy little seaside hamlet of Akumal. It doesn't take long before you're driving down a long stretch of four lane highway in nowheresville with nothing but thick and thicker jungle-like brush on both sides of the road. Not a gas station or driveway or anything for miles.
This is about the time I'm wondering why in the heck I thought an old Beetle would be such a cool mode of transportation...but after almost two hours we make it.
Scoring an off-season condo on Akumal Bay, just a slow movin' little town with lots of rikety bicycles with no crowd of tourists to plow into. It was cool/scary to snorkel around in the chest high ocean, cool to watch the Sea Turtles underwater, scary cuz of what else might appear.
We ran down to Tulum and took in the ruins amid the throng of basketball court sized, tightly packed, sight-seeing buses.
As we headed back up the highway toward Cancun, little things like my wife holding her breath and crossing her legs as we scoured the landscape for a restroom or tall weeds, repeating the mantra: Please Don't Breakdown- Please Don't Breakdown only added much zest to our adventure. In the end, and like the trooper she is bless her heart, my wife never once, through-out the entire excursion, ever attempt to harsh my mellow, nor I her's as far as I know.

Photo from Wikimedia