Taking friends on their first trip to Mérida

Life has been busy and chaotic (what else is new?) so I am very, very far behind.

In January, we went to Mérida for Angie's birthday. We brought along two friends who had never been out of the country besides Canada, and when you live as close to Canada as we do, that's not particularly an accomplishment.

It's a strange experience. I talk about Mérida so much it was kind of like introducing someone to your girlfriend for the first time. You don't expect them to fall madly in love, but you want to have them walk away saying "I get why he's so in love."

The other side of that is when I travel with other people I don't like to put expectations on them or myself. I don't want them to feel like they have to do what I want to do, or I have to do what they want to do. Because different people like different things.

Some people like structure and to have every detail of their trip planned out. Some people like to go with the flow.

So I figured we'd do a little of column A, and a little of column B.

We rented a nice house with a great pool in the Centro about two blocks from Paseo de Montejo and right across the street (and I mean right across the street) from the bakery SOCO Merida. Waking up to the smell of the baking bread every morning was the most amazing experience.

Our house rental in Mérida, photo by Ivan Miller
Someday when we are able to build our house, we need to lure a bakery to open shop across the street. It's a must!

I could get up and walk across the street while everyone else slept, eat breakfast and enjoy the morning. When Angie rolled out of bed, she'd come across the street to have a coffee and read a magazine and chat while we waited for our friends to wake up. Oh, it was wonderful.

While the house was perfectly situated and the rooms were great and the pool was refreshing, there were some downsides.

The kitchen was tiny. Not a huge drawback, we weren't going to be slinging gourmet meals in there, but you definitely were going to be struggling squeezing in more than two people. That was small potatoes to the bigger issue, the finicky gas. Sometimes it would work, briefly. And the rest of the time it wouldn't work at all. We called the rental service and they sent someone over to check it and have the tank refilled. We were out of the house at the time and while it worked for them, it again only briefly worked for us.

If that just meant that our in-home meals were not going to happen, no big deal. The bigger issue meant no hot water for showering. Going from super hot weather to super ice cold showers was quite a jolt to the system!

The solution was a dip in the pool to cool off a little bit, then to the frigid shower. It didn't make it comfortable, but it made for less teeth-rattling showering.

In the next post I'll share more of what we did in and around Mérida.

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