A full-length report

Hello and welcome to an Altitude Problem, back at altitude and ready to go. We wish. The mind is ready, the legs are ready, the stomach and the weather are not.

I could attach pictures to this post, but I have not yet transferred the pictures from the camera to this computer for Mexico, and the video in the upper right hand corner of this blog gives an idea of the scenery on our Porcupine rim ride. So pardon the lack of pictures...honestly this post is big enough without them.

We went to Moab two weeks ago with my parents, a long-planned three day vacation, and did a lot of relaxing. We hiked out to Delicate Arch with them, biked Bar-M loop (a super friendly gravel bike loop) and hung out in town, taking the dogs to the lake for swims in the afternoons, taking them on bike rides in town, browsing shops, sampling food. On our second day there, I drank a killer mango smoothie, and I do mean it nearly killed me. About an hour after I finished it, I began wondering if I had made a big mistake, an hour after that, i knew I had, I tried to settle my stomach by eating a tamale for dinner, and felt better for about four and a half minutes before I felt a whole lot worse, stumbled to the bedroom to lie down, and was about to make a bolt for the bathroom when the bathroom door closed and the shower turned on. I lay there, afraid to move a single muscle lest I see the tamale and smoothie again, and finally called out to whomever it may concern, to see if the bathroom would soon be empty. My dad brought me the kitchen trash can. I promptly filled it with smoothie and tamale. As soon as everyone had gone to bed, me and my trash can moved out to the couch, since B seems to have this odd hang-up about being in the same room as someone who is vomiting. I can't imagine why. That was a long, long night for me and my ex-smoothie.

We spent the next day showing my parents all the impressive, yet easily accessible spots we know of in Moab, which mostly means the national parks. We took Potash Road to Shafer Canyon, a fairly smooth road by Moab standards that winds up from Moab Valley to Island in the Sky. It has a lot of vertical, and some pretty impressive drop-offs and gets pretty narrow (not by Moab standards) in a few spots. I finally got brave enough late in the day to brave a few pretzels, and they did not cause any ill effects, although I was completely wiped out by the night before. I cautiously sipped my watered-down gatorade, and worked on rehydrating without overdoing it, and by that evening, was feeling almost human again.

My parents left to ride down to Main street, and Andy was acting like he needed some exercize, so B decided to take him on a bike ride. After some thought, I decided I felt like a little exercise might do me good, too, so I tied Andy to my handlebar and off we went, bickering about the fact that B had forgotten to bring Andy's poo-bags when we left the condo. We tried to ride fast, so we cold get to the poo-bag dispenser on the bike path before Andy had to go, but I could tell he was already starting to hunch up. I pedalled harder. Without warning, Andy stopped dead, jerking my hadlebars sideways, and left a big pile right in the middle of the bike lane, ejecting me sideways. I ran a few giant steps, pulling my bike along behind me, and then sent B on ahead several blocks to get a poo-bag. He finally returned, picked up the evidence, and off we went. A few minutes later, we met my parents coming back, and tehy decided to ride along with us, so we led them along to Mill Creek parkway (the city bike path) to a wood-chip path that crosses a stream and comes out on the other end of town.

Now, B and I had ridden this trail before, and he had carefully caried his bike, careful not to get his shoes wet, and as he was doing so, I, like a total show-off, had studied it, turned around, gotten a run at it, splashed across, rode up the bank on the other side, and stood there mocking him and he finished picking his way across. So this time, he knew it could be done. He was in the lead, then my parents, and I was "riding sweeps" with Andy, so I had time to see him hit the water and ride across. My parents hit their brakes, not expecting a water crossing. I dodged them, losing momentum, and making Andy dodge me, throwing me just a little off balance, but not much...I was still confident I could do it, especially since it would not do to not do it, since B had just done it, and I would show him I could even do it with a dog tied to my handlebar...I dropped my bike off the bank, and all heck broke loose. Andy may have bolted, I don't know, because I was too busy watching my front wheel not rolling over a big round babyhead right in front of it. Then I was face-planting in the water and my bike was crashing down on my back. I lay down in the stream for a moment, spread-eagle, my legs wrapped around my handlebars, and assessed the rediculosity of the situation for a moment, afraid of what I might find in the way of bodily harm should I get up. Then I was up, and grabbing my left ring finger, pain blossoming through it. I finally stopped squeezing it and walked my bike out of the stream, water squishing in my shoes, in the padding in my bike shorts, the wind blowing my soaked bike jersey against me. I attempted to straighten my brake and shifter that had been turned to the bottom side of my handlebar, and cautiously stepped into my pedals, to Bobby's mix of anger, glee, and concern. Andy, in the meantime, had flopped down in the running water, apparently thinking that since I had done it, he could, too.

It was a long ride back to the condo with my wet clothes. I put them out on the patio, hoping the bikeshorts and shoes would dry, and went to bed, my finger hurting, my legs and ego bruised, my stomach muscles sore from the ex-smoothie weight-loss plan.

The next morning, I got up to take Andy out to potty, and found Jeremy sleeping on the living room floor. Yes, this had been pre-arranged. He had left Flagstaff the night before, leaving after his last final at 7:00 pm, and had driven most of the night to get there. Andy nearly fell apart. Unfortunately, he had a full bladder when he nearly fell apart, and after he had gotten over the shock of seeing Jeremy, whom he dearly loves, in his living room, there was a wild welcome, the evidence of which stayed on poor Jeremy's sleeping pad. I was, of course, mortified, but he was good about it, and I took a bit of hand sanitizer, diluted with warm water to it. I hope I got it all and J won't have to be reminded of Andy whenever he goes camping from now on.

Apart from the uncomfortable feeling of spending the day in a still-wet bike chamois and wet shoes that created blisters on my heels, the next day was epic. We used my dad to shuttle us up to the top of Porcupine Rim, and we rode down almost 3,000 feet to Negro Bill's Canyon. It took me about on hour of riding to get brave about riding off ledges after my experience the night before, and my ring finger swelled up and throbbed the whole day, but after a while I got more brave and didn't crash, no matter what I decided to ride off of...until 20 minutes from the bottom. It was a pretty tame crash, but it was simple physics, a softer substance gave way to a harder substance, as in, epidermis to slickrock, and I finished the ride with blood running from my knee into my shoe.

We got back to town and hit Zax for lunch, traded the pictures and video from the day's ride to each other's computers, told Jeremy good-bye, and hit the road. My parent's had already left town, taking Andy with them, and we all met at Grandma Rose and Grandpa Bill's place in Eagle for a few hours before continuing home.

My parents took Andy home with them, and spent the next two days getting ready for stage two of our spring vacation.

(Okay, this next part was originally written as a separate post. I am sorry it is long, but hey. Trip reports are. You can't cover a week in a sentence and expect your mother or your aunt to not ask for more details while they are pretending to be interested. Just a warning though, there are many, many more words and sentences and paragraphs to follow. You might want to bail now, before we get on a plane to Mexico.)

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where we are counting- eleven days until the BolderBoulder, the 10K I am planning on running in Boulder with my friend on Memorial Day weekend. I can run 10k fairly easily, but my speed has suffered lately. And now, when I need to be hitting the training these last few days before I take a pre-race break, I am stuck with the leftover ill-effects of two weeks of vacation, a week of that in Mexico. It seems it does not matter how careful one is, it just happens. Not severely, but enough to keep me off the trails.

I risked a run yesterday, and made it back to the house without making a mad dash into the woods (I know, classy, huh?) and the weather was somewhat cooperative, giving me about an hour's gap between rain showers. There was a bit of stinging sleet in the last mile, but Andy and I enjoyed being back up where one can breathe light, invigorating air and run for miles without being weighted down by thick air and heavy humidity. My running in Mexico was an interesting experience, and I must have trained harder there than I thought I did, because I am feeling like I got in better shape there. But while there, I felt like I was always a few steps away from crawling, lifting heavy, weighted legs, forcing each step, feeling more like I was only putting one foot in front of the other to keep from falling. The resort where we stayed threw in a surprise charge for use of the work-out facilities, so my plan to spend my days lifting, running on a treadmill, stretching, and basically living between the gym and the beach like I did on our last trip to Mexico was thwarted by me not wanting to pay $12 USD a day to do so. For this reason, we will definitely not be staying at any of the Royal resorts again- they all do this, I was told when I professed disbelief at having to pay more for use of their three treadmills and small weight bench than I have to pay in SkiTown, U.S.A. for use of a 12,000 square foot facility. I will be making sure that use of the resort's gym is free, since working out is always a major part of a vacation for me. I went a little nuts without spending an hour twice a day doing that. I don't do well with lying on a beach. An hour after I settle in, I am experiencing phantom hunger pains borne of severe boredom.

I chose to run along Kukulcan Blvd my first few days. The first day was one of the worst runs of my life. I had not realized the gym was not free that morning, and did not get around to going down and checking it out until about 10:00 that morning, and then realized I could not afford it so, simmering and muttering to myself, I took to the road. The sun was high, buses rocketed past a few feet from the sidewalk, I had to dodge people at bus stops, dodge taxis, dodge tourists in flip flops. It was hot, and sweat dripped down my face, beaded on my upper lip, the hiumidity turned my hairdo into a fuzzy mass of frizz, my face, I am sure, was beet red, my shirt was soaked, my shorts rode up, and, of all things, I got stopped in this state by a timeshare hustler and had to spend five minutes fast-talking, explaining why I would not like to spend the day in some fabulous resort. And apparently, runners get honked at there. By the end of the run, I was not whipping around every time a horn beeped beside me, thinking I was in someone's way, even though I was on the sidewalk. I did not feel like I was getting very far very fast, and I had overspent my energy at the beginning of the run because I was still muttering about the gym, and I tend to run too hard when I am upset. By the time I got back, I was completely overheated, dehydrated, had a headache and a sunburn, my knees and ankles hurt, my clothes were stuck to me and sweat was rollong down my back and chest, and, since my shorts would not stay down, had a nasty bit of chub-rub going on the upper legs. I got back to the condo completely grouchy, did not feel like going to the pool, and slept for several hours.

I got smarter after that, running at 6:00a.m., and even then, running along Kukulcan was stressful and hot, so I started leaving my shoes behind and running on the beach. After three days of that, my calves were constantly on fire from lifting me out of the sand with every step, and the tendons in the bottoms of my feet were burning, but it was cooler because I could run in the surf. Now that I am home, I have mapped the distances and realized I ran between two and a half and five and a half miles every day, although I have no idea how, because it felt like I was running barely two miles. Maybe it is easier to run at sea level, but the only way to tell it is by comparing how far you went, because it certainly does not feel easier.

Since we went down to get B's wisdom teeth out, we only had two and a half days to do touristy things. We had planned on doing some exploring on the day we got there, but we had planned on spending about an hour getting through customs and ended up spending almost three hours. We had skipped lunch, because our flight left Denver just before lunchtime and was only a three and a half hour flight, and we were not hungry in Denver, but by the time we got through the nearly three hour wait in the customs line, we were famished, and had no idea where to go to eat. We spent another hour and a half renting our car and getting talked into a timeshare presentation the next day, with a reward of free admission to the eco-park we wanted to visit, but were stressed out about paying the entrance fee. When we realized we had driven right past our hotel and would have to turn around, our blood sugar had hit rock bottom. We pulled off the road while searching for the hotel, dug in our luggage, and shared a Boost shake that B had brought for sustenance after his surgery, when he would be unable to eat solid food. It spiked our blood sugar levels just enough to convince us we might live, even though we were both still shaky, and we found the hotel, waited in line some more, got lost finding our room on the seventh floor, and finally, found it and began perusing the restaurant guide on the coffee table. It was long after dark by the time we walked down to a restaurant on the edge of the resort grounds, and, unsure about whether it was on the resort's water purification system, ordered our food and the drink special of the night- a margarita that, we noted through our hypoglycemic haze as our waitress rattled off the ingrediants, contained only a nominal amount of lime juice, it was mostly Grand Marnier, Tequila, and several other boozy ingredients. I was expecting it to be small and cheap and mostly ice, like the margaritas served in the Mexican restaurants at home. It was none of those things. We shared it without water, and mostly before our meal arrived because we were thirsty, and it only took a minute before it hit the bloodstream. I managed to steer about one-fourth of my flautas to my mouth between giggling hysterically at B trying to coordinate closing his mouth around the enchiladas on his fork before they dropped back onto his plate. We spent a long time trying to do impossibly complicated math involving figuring out a twenty percent tip in pesos, and thought we nailed it brilliantly, only the next day realizing we had actually left about a twelve percent tip. We weaved our way out of the restaurant, wondering why they would fill the parking lot with little round holes and plant grass in them, topes (speed bumps) for drunk people, found our room and sprawled on the couch to wait until the spinning stopped. We finally woke up, showered and stumbled to bed around midnight.

The next morning, we grabbed the map to the timeshare presentation, left the hotel bright and early, and got spotted by a concierge woman out front, who stopped us asking if we needed a taxi, and apparently, has eyes like a hawk when it comes to timeshare invitations from rival resorts. She descended on us with guns blazing. "Where are you going?" I immediately began to formulate a lie, but B just blurted the truth, and what followed for the next ten minutes was a valuable lesson for him in the art of evasion. She tried all the tricks. "Why would you want to go somewhere else? You are staying here. Don't you like it here? Why would you want to waste your day? What did they offer you? Who did you talk to? You do not want to go there. It is not nice like here." Yes, yes, okay, we must be going now... "Did they say 90 minutes? It will be at least five hours. Did they offer you breakfast? They will not give you breakfast. Did they offer you a shopping gift certificate? They did not tell you that is only valid if you buy a timeshare. Did they offer you free admission to the park? You will only get a small discount. Okay, you want free admission? We can give you tickets. If that is what you want, you do not need to drive to Playa Del Carmen. You can stay right here. Don't you want to stay here?" By this time, I was tugging B's arm, in full sight of her. He kept looking at me as if to ask what was wrong with me, and I was being rude. I kept saying, Oh, we want to be able to see the whole area, not just the Zona Hotelera, we enjoy being able to tour resort grounds, it is okay, we have been to timeshare presentations before, we know what we are getting into. We know what to expect, blah, blah. I finally interrupted her with quite the bubbly, "thank you very much, don't worry, we will be back," smiled as sweetly as if I were not being rude, and succeeded in pulling B enough off balance that he took an unintentional step toward the parking lot. She raised her eyebrows at him. "Ahh, she is a tough one, huh?" and we scuttled off, casting nervous glances over our shoulders, half expecting to see her running after us swinging her clipboard at our heads.

I learned later that time is running out for these salespeople who get tourists off the streets herded into timeshare presentations, because the Mexican government takes very seriously any complaints coming from tourists, and one of the main complaints is that they feel harrassed by these people. It will soon become illegal for them to do this, and the only way of selling for the resorts will be to sell to people already staying there, or people specifically requesting a presentation. Our host at the presentation told us that he ends up making a sale to about 1/3 of the people who come in off the street, so this represents a huge loss of sales for them, which may be why it seemed to be hitting such a fever pitch right now. And that, because one sale generates such income for the resort and the salesperson, they pay these people out working the streets well. Very well. Porsche and beachfront property well. Obviously, with that in mind, this particular woman pulled out all the stops, even resorting to outright lies, in an effort to keep us away from her rival resort.

We got to Playa Del Carmen and registered for the presentation, and were quite impressed with the cool, leafy grandeur of the Mayan Palace. Our particular salesman saw immediately that we were not ownership material, and we leisurely toured the grounds, winding through a labyrinth of blue pools and dripping greenery and hidden, shady corners and foliage more worthy of an Audobon center than a resort. We finally found ourselves in a shaded, open-air restaurant overlooking a small lake, sharing the place with several hundred other presentees, and a brilliant green iguana looking for scraps. Our host ended up being a very personable fellow, and I am pretty sure that normally, breakfast time is filled with sales pitch, but by the time we got done with our chit-chat, exchanging life stories, a near tear or two over a tragedy in his recent past, a long discussion about the way tourists from the US tend to act on vacation, and how to best present oneself in a foreign country, how to gain a local's acceptance by open-mindedness toward their culture, hobbies and interests, and a discussion about roads less traveled in the Playa Del Carmen area, racism in the U.S., and how it is difficult for many people in other countries to see beyond the white-trash deep-south mentality when meeting people from the states, how it annoys them when we call ourselves Americans when, actually, we make up only about one-fourth of the Americas...by the time we had covered so much ground, we all realized this was not an ordinary timeshare presentation, and we had long passed our 90 minute promised time and had not even begun the sales pitch. Other salespeople had long left with their marks, our table had been long cleared, the restaurant had been quiet and empty for a long time, save for our chatter. Not that we minded, because there could have been far worse ways to spend a beautiful, hot morning on vacation than in an pleasant restaurant on a lake, iguanas sneaking past our feet, songbirds chirping, palm leaves rustling, a cool breeze ticking our faces, chatting with an english-speaking local.

Ended up, he missed his scheduled tee-time that afternoon, and we spent all morning and most of the afternoon there, and he still flew through the sales-pitch part of it before we left, and we (of course) all knew we would not buy, having covered during our breakfast talkathon our whole new grab-life and live-in-the-present philosophy that extends to our finances, and how we do not really believe it is a healthy way to live to commit one's future to debt when one can be just as happy in the present with less car, less house, less luxury, and more friendship, more love, more living.

The next morning, we drove out to Xcaret (pronounced ESH-cah-ret), the park we had researched while still at home. Turned out, it was not quite as natural as we had hoped, and we realized that the park next door, Xplor, might have been more what we thought we were getting. We had thought we would find fairly natural underground rivers and caves like the ones the area is famous for, but the underground river ended up being very child-friendly, and only a little bit underground, and I suspect from the smooth walls of the oval tunnels, mostly man-made. The park next door boasted the stalactite-filled caves we had been expecting. But we still enjoyed our day, wondering between exhibits of native animals, fish, birds and reptiles, finding hidden walkways and getting lost in the labyrinth of footbridges and paths through rainforest foliage and damp earth, popping out on the beach to hammocks and palm trees, ducking back into the shade. We felt our way in near-total dark back to a cave filled with bats, peered over moats to watch spider monkeys, deer, panthers and jaguires, watched quail chicks hatch, watched sea turtles, dolphins, manatees, crocodiles in the water. In the early afternoon, we left the park and drove the Royal Haciendas, a resort we had access to because it was part of Royal Resorts, the same group our resort was part of. We had lunch at one of the resort restaurants, La Palapa, chugged about three tall glasses of water, dehydrated from our day, gorged ourselves on Sopa Limon and fish, sat and enjoyed the salty ocean breeze on our faces as we sat on the shady patio, then wondered out to the pool area. My swimsuit was wet, and I had changed into a sundress to go eat, and did not feel like changing. As we were eating, I kept seeing people rowing past in kayaks, and I asked about it at the activities desk, and was told all they charged was a smile. B ran to the resort store to buy sunscreen, and I signed in, grabbed the paddles and life jackets, and headed to the beach to meet the guy as he dragged them down to the water's edge. I waited and waited for B to get back, and finally, shoved my kayak into the water without him, filled the seat up with water getting in while being buffetted by waves, and took off. I was soaked from the waist down in salt water in no time. B finally returned, I paddled back to shore and we both headed out, shooting over the rope they had told us to stay inside, and enjoyed the higher-than-normal waves until B started feeling a bit seasick. We went back, retured the paddles, and he hit the pool. I was in a wet dress. The salty water was making my legs stick together, and the above-the-knee skirt did not allow for lounging in a pool chair. I finally slathered up with suscreen and left to go walk down the beach, not helping the chub-rub in the least.

Okay, so a side note here. You know how when women walk, they put one foot directly in front of the other? Men walk with their feet pointed out, a side-to-side swagger that never allows their thighs to touch. But all except the most anorexic women have a brief moment of contact between upper legs. And it never causes a problem except for when you introduce salt water and sand to the mix. Well, welcome to the beach. It will have the most elegantly-striding supermodel walking like a man in no time. They call this unfortunate, painful malady chub-rub, even if there is very little chub involved, and there is no shame in it, since all healthy women have a bit of chub to rub on their upper legs. I personally like to say I am in great health, which is to say, there is most definitely chub.

A thirty minute walk along the water down to Playa Del Carmen's public beach and back did not help the problem, but it did dry my dress from sopping wet to merely damp. I could feel a bad mood coming on, especially if I had to be in the sun any longer, so B acted quickly to avert it and we drove back to Xcaret.

We went to the show that evening in the theater inside the park, the scent of citronella heavy and the candles held by the audience winking and flickering all around us, and watched the interpretive dance that told the Mayan's story. We left at intermission, because we were both feeling exhausted from our day in the sun.

The next morning was the reason for the trip, and the thing we dreaded most about it. The dentist. We drove into downtown Cancun and found the dentist, who after one glance at B's x-rays, doubled the price quoted for a standard wisdom tooth extraction. They showed me his x-rays, two severely impacted lower teeth, two upper teeth that were halfway in, but at extreme angles, and one small, pointy tooth that seemed to be floating behind them. I asked about it. The dentist giggled a little and said, "Oh, yeah. And there's a baby tooth. Don't worry, we'll get that out, too."

They got him started, and took me upstairs to a small loft above his cubicle to check me out and fill some cavities. At one point, I sat up and peeked over the railing in time to see them bringing out a big, bloody chunk of tooth from his mouth. It took them almost four hours to get them all out, and it ended up that they could use disolveable stitches only on the inside, but had to use stronger stitches on the outside, the holes left by his teeth needing two layers of stitches. He drove to the condo one-handed, holding ice to his face, and I ran into a pharmacy and attempted to tell them what I needed for his pain meds. Back at the condo, his face began to swell...and swell...and swell.

We had hoped that on our last day there, we would be able to drive the three hours to Chichen Itza, beat the tour buses, and check it out. Chichen Itza was going to cost us about $80 USD apiece, so we had had second thoughts about it, but then we realized that if you drive yourself out there, it only costs like $3 USD plus gas. Unfortunately, B did not recover as fast as we had hoped, and by our last day there, he was feeling better, but walking still jiggled his cheeks and jaw, so we just hung out at the resort the entire remaining four days. He slept in, I ran in the mornings, came back, mixed up smoothies and protein shakes for B, we took naps through the hottest part of the afternoons, watched whatever movies were on cable in English and went down to the beach as soon as the sun began to dip behind the row of high-rises on the strip of hotel hell that is the Zona Hotelera. Then, as soon as we got cold because the sun was down and the breeze was damp, we went back up to the room and sat out on the deck, where the weak wifi signal was the strongest, and tried to pick up internet.

We had nowhere else to be between check-out time at 11:00 am, and our flight at 4:00 pm, since B's face still hurt too much to be out in the hot sun, and we had no desire to go shopping, so we dropped of fthe rental car and spent four hours at the airport. Another three and a half hours on the plane, about two minutes to get through customs in Denver (Oh, how I love DIA), and we hit the road for Kansas. My friend Ginta met us just outside denver, and I jumped in with her and her almost-three year old son, and we drove through the dark flatlands, flashing past half a dozen deer along the road. Thankfully, none of then jumped out at us, and we talked, and talked, and talked (neither of us has much of a problem with keeping a conversation going)until we turned into Marienthal, and scared the daylights out of Andy, who had apparently taken on guard-dog responsibilities while my parent were dogsitting him. B walked into the house, and woke Andy from a dead sleep with his intruder alarm at full volume, and it took awhile to realize that the shadowy, menacing intruder trying to be heard over the barking and growling was just his beloved B, come back for him. Of course, after he realized who it was, he turned into a whining, groveling pile of Golden Retriever relief and love. By the time Ginta and I got into the house, all that was left of his panicked protective frenzy was a puddle on the floor.

Andy is a very job-oriented dog, and lately, has finally settled on his area of expertise- watch dog. He has gotten very loud and agressive-sounding when he perceives a threat to his people. Not that he would ever carry out the foul threats he makes, because if the intruder does turn threatening, he hides behind me, so he makes a terrible guard dog, but he can watch and alert. But he can make the faint of heart quiver in the knees and rethink the whole Golden-Retrievers-are-harmless-creatures thing.

We had a great time at Donny and Laci's wedding, catching up with people we have not seen in years, and I got to show Ginta where I grew up, five hours and several light years from where I live now.

And now, I'm done. If you are still reading, I salute you.