Return to Isla Mujeres!

Ken & I love Mexico, so when we saw a "Living Social" non-stop airfare deal from New Orleans to Cancun .. we jumped on it! Yeah, we moved onto Nirvana a couple of months ago & are prepping her for cruising this winter, but traveling is our main goal so why wait?! The deal required us to fly on certain dates, which meant we needed to spend 6 nights in Mexico. We decided to spend 3 nights on Isla Mujeres, and then another 3 nights in Cancun.

On the morning of July 30th, we hopped on a plane and arrived in Cancun 1.5 hours later.  After a 20 minute ferry ride through gorgeous, blue waters we arrived on Isla Mujeres.  Here are a few pics from the ferry ...

We love all the palm trees!

We were there for a late lunch/early dinner of tacos & beer. After a series of tough events the past two months, we were so ready to chill out! How does three tacos & two beers for $5 bucks sound? So good!

We stayed on the little island of Isla Mujeres last year, and we loved it. It's full of palm trees, beautiful beaches, gorgeous rocky shores, spectacular sunset views, golf carts & scooters to get around, and really inexpensive food, beer & fresh margaritas!

We stayed at the same hotel as last year since the price was right & it's located on one of the main streets of the island .. lots of bars, restaurants & activity with live music in the evenings. Ken forgot how hard the beds are at this hotel .. he needed about 30 minutes every morning to work out the kinks in his back! Other than that, we still loved the location and the pool.  Here's a pic of the Hotel Plaza Almendros from last year ...

See that guy sitting in front? He books tours, and was there again this year. We decided to take the advice of our new friends at our marina back home and book a "Whale Shark" tour with this guy. More about that in the next post! 

We spent the first two & a half days chilling at the beach ...

and touring the island on a golf cart.

I've mastered the "selfie"!

We stopped at one of our favorite places from last year .. "The Joint". We had nachos & beer, and listened to live music with a great guitar player!

We stumbled across the only brewery on the island .. Isla Brewing Company, so we had to stop in. The owners are from North Carolina & fairly new to Isla. They had four beers, and we sampled two of them. They were really good!

See the woman Ken's talking to in the picture below? It turned out that she lives on a sailboat & arrived with her husband just 4 months earlier! They planned to stay a few weeks, but fell in love with the island and decided to stay through hurricane season. We enjoyed talking with her, as we hope to sail our own boat to Isla Mujeres someday!

 As I mentioned last year .. I'm not a big margarita fan, but the fresh-made margaritas on Isla Mujeres are really good! Those two margaritas were fixin' to be ours!

While the island has great Mexican food, they also have a great variety of other food too. We tried  Italian food on both of our trips, and it was really good. We've been told that the island has quite a few Italians that have moved there & opened up restaurants.

We enjoyed the island as much as last year, but we didn't take near as many photos this time around. If you want to see a lot more .. check out these posts from last year or this photo album! Last year we rented a scooter instead of a golf cart & I made a little amateur video .. check it out here!

Next up .. swimming with whale sharks!

Hasta luego .. until then. Mid-Life Cruising!