Four Tickets to Paradise.

Wow, it's been a while. Good to see you.

My family and I just got back from Cancun. It's a little hard to say that without sounding all Thurston Howell the Third-ish, like "Lovie and I simply adored summering on the Yucatan Peninsula," but yep, Charlie and his three angels did in fact spend the past eight days in the land where Corona flows from the Caribbean and Pacifico from the... Pacific, I suppose.

Cuervo is also available.


Some people like to post vacation pictures while still vacationing. That's cool—go ahead and show me that photo you just took of your polished toenails against a backdrop of azure tropical splendor:

I'm not going to lie; I'm just too paranoid. How do I know that just one of my two-hundred-ninety-one FB BFFs won't decide to bust into Casa de Nardwood and abscond with my dusty baggie of Berlin Wall chunks and my rare collection of Bobby Sherman B-sides?

Too tempting with eBay and all.

The flight over was exhausting, as you can see:

When you're used to sleeping more hours per day than a roofied cat, arising at 2:00AM for a ride to the airport seems unattainable. But they dug deep.

We met up with my sister, her husband and their daughter at the Cancun airport and the bacchanalia began. After a couple of days spent on the beach emerging from the profound fog of the two-hour time difference, it was time to sample the charms of this Latin American Eden.

Our first major excursion was on the outskirts of Cancun for a twelve-part, two-mile zip lining adventure. The driver swung the van door shut on our seven sticky, white bodies and motored quickly out of town toward the thick jungle above which we'd be zooming on a thin cable. What could possibly go wrong?

We were given stickers on which to write our names. Scratching the ever-present itch to be someone I'm not, I scrawled the name "Jzeert" on my name tag, in honor of all the IKEA furniture I've assembled.  Unfortunately, my wife dubbed it merely another of my attention-seeking ploys and called me "Jeerk" for the remainder of the trip.

No waiver? No problem. Only then did I realize how uptight our country is about safety, all that paperwork just to have a little fun. Just makes the lawyers richer, right?

We climbed a wooden stairway that would have made M.C. Escher gargle his Oreos. Finally above the tree line, one-at-a-time we clipped in and launched into the sultry abyss.

What a freaking rush. It was one of those experiences where you want to freeze time just to allow your senses to absorb everything around you—the sounds, the smells...the sights. On the third leg we were given the option of repelling upside down, accompanied by a guide. Although we don't have photos, this is what it looks like:

Holy shit. Not since I'd been allowed to slide down the pole at the Sumner Fire Station on my third birthday had I felt that kind of visceral jolt to my monkey brain stem.

By the time we'd reached the sixth segment, I noticed water dripping down the stairs behind me. Wait, that's not water, that's me! I looked down and the kid behind me had given himself about a six-stair cushion in order to dodge the onslaught of perspiration from the panting Rush Limbaugh above him.

My t-shirt was soaked like it had just been pulled from a washing machine. I had no choice but to purchase another shirt from the gift shop afterwords. For no additional charge, they offered to print my name on the front, and half and hour later, I peeled on a fresh dry t-shirt with the name "Jzeert" in bold green letters.

We stuck closer to our home base for the rest of the time. While most of us engaged in traditional, healthy activities like boogie boarding:

My sister chose to explore her darker side and capitalize on Mexico's more permissive, laissez-faire attitudes:

We ate. And ate. And then ate some more, with my daughter falling just shy of the twenty-taco milestone. Here we are in a Mexican restaurant eating Mexican food, but down there it's just called being in a restaurant eating food.

I'd like to close this post with an image my daughter photographed from our table at our favorite establishment, a place called "Captain's Cove," and a poignant observation from my favorite philosopher, Jack Handey:

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

Via con Dios.