Wednesday April 4, 2007

My wife Lita and I have flown from Seattle to Zihuatanejo, Mexico to stay at the Casa Que Canta for a few days before boarding a cruise ship to meet our entire office and their families for our annual office retreat. We´ve not been here before. It resembles a sleepy Mexican fishing village on a beautiful bay, but it has some 80,000 inhabitants. The bay has numerous boats of all sizes bobbing up and down on anchor. The weather is 86 degrees and sunny. The hotel is on the steep side of a cliff overlooking the bay and one walks numerous winding rock stairs to get anywhere on the hotel grounds. If you follow the stairs far enough it ends at the beach with huge rocks and crashing waves. The sound of the waves is constant.

This morning a Carnival cruise ship came in like an overloaded cargo ship with containers stacked too high. After anchoring it began to ferry the passengers to shore, tender after tender. Since we haven`t visited the down town area yet I can only picture shops with tourist items and an area geared for cruise ship passengers. Fishing boats and other boats are picking up passengers for adventures in fishing and perhaps scuba diving. The bay has become a hot bed of boating activity.

We watch all of this from a comfortable position near the sea at the bottom of the stairs where there is a constant cooling breeze. The waiter brings water and towels while we waste time reading and doing very little. We did learn the food here is excellent and the sea food extremely fresh from our dinner last nite. It´s difficult to maintain my Lenten sacrifices while surrounded by temptations of drink and food, but I am trying. The hotel is in a lovely setting over the bay and the unit we have features its own unheated small dip pool. As the old saying goes "I wonder what the rich people are doing today?"