Our cruise leaves on Saturday, February 29, but we decided to go a day early to avoid any stress related to flight delays, etc. Although we’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico, we’d never been to Cabo so thought it might be nice to at least spend a day there to see how it compared to the “Mexican Riviera” (Cancun and the areas north and south of it).
As it turns out, we knew nothing. We got to the airport and had trouble finding the flight on the departure board. We were looking for Cabo San Lucas, but in fact, United lists the destination as Los Cabos. For additional fun, there was no potable water at the airport due to the very large water main break that had happened the day before in Houston. As a result, there was a boil notice for water and so the airport had no water. Restaurants were basically only serving bottled items and bathrooms had lots of hand sanitizer and notes telling you not to wash your hands with the water. As it turns out, a number of folks on our cruise had connections through Houston and couldn’t figure out why there was no water there.
Once we arrived in Mexico, we noticed immediately how different the terrain was. The area along the Baja Peninsula is quite mountainous and large parts of it seem to be desert. As a result, the air was much drier and ended up being really pleasant during our stay. It seems to be a big advantage over the Cancun area. A disadvantage was that everything seemed quite a bit more expensive.
We stayed at a really nice hotel (JW Marriott Resort in San José del Cabo using points that Travis had from work travel. Despite the “free” hotel room, we spent a lot on food/alcohol in the 24 hours we were there. That said, the hotel was beautiful and we had a really nice time. The hotel is on the side of a very steep hill and has multiple stretches of it that seem to have sunken gardens along with lots of tiered swimming pools.
We got to the hotel in time for a late lunch and then just hung out at the pool for the rest of the day. It was a nice start for the week.
View from our room. None of the pools are visible from our room but there are lots of large fountains in gardens towards the front of the phone.
View from one of the pools. The place wasn’t very crowded.
These little birds were all over the resort. They were cute and sort of playful.
There was this very large boulder on the beach that was covered with cairns (stacks of rocks). Some of them were started with a rock crammed into the side of the big boulder and then built up from there.
