Mexico!

Paul and I took our first vacation together post-kids this past week and it was amazing!  We went to Puerto Vallerta, Mexico.  The endless beach was absolutely beautiful and we both loved the Mexican culture, people, food, and language.  Here are a few pictures we took throughout our 5 days in Mexico.  Warning - there are a lot of selfies of the two of us - we had fun taking pictures of us together, because, honestly?, we hardly have any pictures of the two of us since the kids were born and we need to play catch-up :).

Thursday:

At the airport -sooo excited!

Breakfast at the airport

Airplane selfie in honor of Kristin and Eric ;)

Mexico!

view from our deck

view from the other side of the hotel

We enjoyed laying by the pool and relaxing after we arrived - amazing!  Then we tried one of the restaurants at our hotel.

Our view from dinner

They cooked this amazing pepper and tomato bread in a flower pot!

Dinner was one of the fanciest I've ever eaten with so many courses - yet thanks to the current Mexican peso exchange to the dollar (18 to 1), our whole dinner was only around $30!  We were shocked when we saw the bill!

so fancy and so delicious!

 We enjoyed an evening walk exploring and I thought it was pretty fun to find a car decorated just like "Herbie the Lovebug".  This picture is for you, Kristin!

 

We had a blast navigating a Mexican grocery store, loving how cheap everything was, and buying a massive container of ice cream to split along with a real spoon (cheaper than a box of plastic spoons!) Unfortunately, the room service must have thought the spoon was theirs and took it so we still joke about how we didn't get to bring home Paul's souvenir Mexican spoon :).

 Friday:

We enjoyed sleeping in and ate a leisurely late breakfast on the beach. 

We spent the day walking all over the town of Old Vallerta (its HUGE with stores and restaurants and more everywhere!) and loved the buildings, churches, cobblestone streets, steep inclined streets, Spanish everywhere and just exploring together!

After walking quite a few miles through the city, we walked the return route back to our house all along the beach.  BEAUTIFUL.  The beach never ends!

 We stopped for lunch at a delicious spot that had the best shrimp fajitas and Paul's favorite salsa we had all trip.

 We then headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up for our evening sailboat cruise.

I forgot to mention that we bought a few things when we walked around that morning - beautiful intricate dresses made by Doloras for each of the girls (I enjoyed chatting with her in Spanish - it takes her a whole day to make a dress) and a Mexican soccer jersey for Colton.  We also bought matching sunglasses :).

Here is Paul posing at the port before we set sail.  We booked three tours (buy two get one free) through Vallarta Adventrues before we arrived and I would whole heartedly recommend all three tours!  The staff were all so much fun and did an amazing job.  The first tour we booked was a sunset sailboat ride.

In front of our sailboat

The horderves they served us on the sailboat!

We enjoyed a late dinner and more exploring later that evening.  There are so many community gatherings, shows, street performers, etc out every night.  We loved the culture!


Saturday

We were both so excited for our day long Adventure Tour we booked for Saturday, and both ranked it as our favorite tour.

We started by hopping in a speed boat to go about a half hour across the ocean, landing at the cutest fishing town.  We then took a unimog (all terrain vehicle) for another half hour up a very steep rugged mountain terrain.  Then we got suited up in our gear and rode another half an hour on mules to the top of the mountain.  We then ziplined, hiked, rappelled, went across rope bridges, climbed ladders, and finally went down two waterslides to get back to the bottom, where we took the unimog back to the fishing town, and the speedboat back to the port.  It was amazing!

We then got cleaned up and went walking around (yes we did a lot of walking and exploring and we both agreed it was one of our favorite parts!) We found an area with a native dance and enjoyed watching that for quite a while...

We loved watching the sunset on the beach...

 As we walked we found a trumpet/drum competition and watched that for a while.

 Fun to see the big church all lit up.

We finally had a late dinner at a really fun Mexican painted restaurant with live music and homemade salsa made for you right at the table while you watched.  So many amazing places to eat - we agreed we could stay for months and never eat at the same place twice! 

Paul was very adventurous, ordering things off the menu that we had never heard of!  I don't remember what this was called, but it came in a big pot with different kinds of meat, pepper, cheese, and green sauce.  He chopped it up and put it in tortillas.  It was really tasty!

 On the walk home we stopped for icecream.

Mexico knows how to do icecream! There are shops all over and it was the most delicious cookies and creme ever!  We stopped again at this spot our last night in Mexico.

Sunday
This was our one morning we didn't sleep in, as our tour today left early.  But we did get to see a beautiful sunrise!

We went on a long boat ride along with probably 150 other people out to the Marieta Islands.  The crew on our boat were hilarious and hammed up the ride with shows, dancing, singing, and more!  We also got to see dolphins!  Once there, we took a smaller boat to the entrance of hidden beach and swam 100 meters to get inside the rock tunnel that was the entrance to the Hidden Beach.  Beautiful and unlike anything I've ever seen.  Our pictures are all a bit blurry as they were on our water camera as we had to swim to get there, but here is a link to a picture of it.  We returned to the big boat and went snorkling, kayaking, and paddle boarding.

Swimming to the Hidden Beach

The Hidden Beach is through this tunnel

In the tunnel on the way to Hidden Beach

Hidden Beach

Swimming Back

Snorkling

Snorkling

Holding a star fish

Paddle Boarding

Show on the boat on the way home

We enjoyed walking home from the port and walking along the beach.  We got cleaned up and chose a beautiful beach front restaurant for our last dinner, just in time for sunset.

Monday:
We slept in, got one last glimpse of our beautiful resort, had a delicious Mexican breakfast, and headed of the to the airport.

We had the perfect trip!

*A huge thank you to the grandparents who took shifts babysitting our kiddos while we were away!  More on that in the next post :).