Italian Restaurant?

I may set some kind of record for misleading blog title with this one! The only Italian restaurant you’ll find in this post is this one:

We’re in Playa del Carmen, at our favorite resort, the Valentin Imperial Riviera Maya. We spent a long weekend over Veterans’ Day (Remembrance Day throughout the rest of the West) back in the States doing our customary early celebration of Thanksgiving. I know I have covered this before, but it bears repeating:

If you face the challenge of getting an extended family together for Thanksgiving (might work for other holidays, but it really works well for this one), consider celebrating it on another week. Really. The date is arbitrary, first selected by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Think about it: choose a different date, and it is suddenly easy to get time off from work, to fly without crowds or drive without congestion. If you have a blended family, you can cede the traditional date to the other side, making you a hero . . . or at least less of a villian.

There will still be football on the telly, turkey to cook, overeating to indulge, and likely the same weather. The same crowd will show up; more, in fact since there are fewer excuses or challenges in getting everyone together, and less stress in travelling. It works, I swear!

Since we saved money by creating a movable Thanksgiving feast, we opted to hit an all-inclusive resort in Quintana Roo afterward. Again, taking a non-traditional route home allows us to access low-cost (SouthWest and Volaris) airlines and get a better rate for the stay, too.

So the other night we were sitting in a French restaurant under the tropical sky (which is full of clouds and rain).

Being a mix of Celt and Saxon, I didn’t miss the hot tropical sun: my people learned to fear the great glowing orb in the sky, as it turns us a very unnatural shade of red.

I always wondered how they control mosquitoes in such an environment. In more than eight visits, I have nary a bite. Yesterday in the afternoon, I saw a thick smoke wafting past my balcony. I asked one of the workers what was on fire, and he explained they were fogging the mosquitoes. Glad to be only briefly exposed!

We’ll rest up for another day then back to the grind of retirement as an expat!