Bienvenidos a Puerto Vallarta!

Well, it took longer than we hoped for, but we're here! We were harrassed a bit on our way out of the airport by different groups trying to sell stuff. Canopy tours, fishing trips, that kind of thing. I may have agreed to listen to a 90-minute schpeel from another hotel in exchange for a 4 night stay voucher (must be used in the next year and a half) and two free massages at their spa. I think I'll bring a stopwatch with me to enforce that 90 minute time limit. Their rep was just so convincing!

Anyway, once we got to the Westin, the first thing we noticed was the view.


Nothing to complain about there. They have three pools dotted with palm trees inside. Apparently the location was a palm tree farm before they built the hotel, so they preserved 600 of the trees. Even the ones where they wanted to build pools. The trees are numbered. The numbers are painted on the side. Number 192 is pretty nice.


By the way, the local style is heavy on bright colors, such as pink. And Jerry is very excited to be here. Though we're a bit tired and frustrated at the trip. Oh, the beach is just gorgeous.


We wandered out of the hotel and found the marina nearby. It's funny, we went from one marina to another for vacation. But it's more tropical here after all. Kind of makes me wish we had a yacht to sail down here in.


The marina has a ring of shops, realtors, massage places, realtors, restaurants, and realtors. By the way, want a condo for $100k? Anyway, we found a non-sketchy ATM, which charged a 7 peso fee. Thing is, all the exchange places were offering much worse rates than the banks do, and 7 pesos is about 60 cents. So, um, that's about the best ATM fee I've ever seen. :-) It feels weird seeing such big numbers for prices, since everything looks like it costs 10 times as much, and they use the dollar sign here to mean peso. Of course, it's actually a bit cheaper than things would be in the states, since it's about 13.25 pesos to the dollar.

Some places even have a good sense of humor about this whole flu thing.
By the way, no flu for us yet! We'll keep y'all posted.

While we ate dinner outside by the beach, there was a wedding going on. It was pretty. Especially with this sunset as a backdrop:


Later, the happy couple fired off some fireworks, which we intended to watch from our balcony jacuzzi, but we had gotten dried off and ready for bed by the time they actually fired them. Still, we had a nice view from our top floor bedroom.