The Jansma’s, after spending the past two spring breaks driving (I did the lion’s share of the driving) down to Destin Florida to get away, decided to change it up and stay at the Iberostar in Riviera Maya. I was in charge of booking flights and initially looked to grab something on Spirit knowing they had direct flights from Detroit to Cancun. Due to the fact that Spirit charges you for everything, even a la carte for the oxygen in the cabin, I scrapped that idea and booked on American Airlines since I have a credit card and am accumulating airline miles. I put almost all of my monthly expenses on my card and am routinely shocked when I go to pay my statement and find out what I have spent. With that in mind, I figured I had enough miles to get us to Australia but in reality would have had a tough time flying from Detroit to Cleveland with the miles I had accrued. (Made me feel quite foolish thinking I’d be able to fly the entire family to Europe this summer on my miles). Our flight left at 12:59 out of Detroit on Saturday. This gave me a chance to play tennis prior to leaving. The unfortunate thing is my kids don’t take after me in most things, but especially when it comes to traveling. They are anxious travelers just like their mom and Shirley called me when I was only midway through my first set. My plan was to leave around 9 or a little after 9, Shirley wanted us on the road no later than 8:30. I cut my tennis short knowing we would have plenty of time, but since turning 50 I have realized life isn’t all about me, just mostly. To everyone’s surprise but me, we arrived at the airport in plenty of time. Two things I don’t understand, why people want to arrive at the airport hours prior to their flight and why they insist on getting on the plane right away when there is assigned seating.

We landed around 7 and it took us roughly 3 hours to get our bags, ground transportation, and arrive at the resort. We made it just in time to eat at one of the buffets at the resort prior to it being shut down. While I was the epitome of a weary traveler from being around my family for an entire day, I was able to rally when I discovered there was a Starbucks walking distance from our resort. I have become addicted to cold brews, I gave up energy drinks years ago in favor of what I believe to be a healthier way to imbibe caffeine. (I may be entirely wrong about that, but ignorance is bliss) Whenever I go on a trip I need to get some type of routine going, unfortunately, my routine was unlikely to involve much, if any sex, due to all of us sleeping in the same room. One of my routines was going to Starbucks in the morning and midway through the week I took my kids with me. That increased the bill substantially but that particular time it was well worth it. We had eaten at the authentic Mexican restaurant at the all inclusive the night before, I had taken two shits already, but I was still a bit concerned about the quarter mile walk to Starbucks. After placing our order, I headed to the second floor to go for deuce number 3, which normally I would call a good morning, actually a good day. I made a rookie mistake, after dropping the kids off at the pool I looked over to discover an empty toilet paper roll. The Starbucks had a main floor and then it was open air with a second floor veranda that had some seating and the bathroom. I pinched my cheeks together, pulled up my shorts and waddled out of the bathroom. I informed my kids that one of them needed to bring me some napkins because there was no toilet paper in the restroom. If it was me being summoned to do that for my dad, a dad who routinely called me pizza face and bean pole, I would have told him to fuck off. However, Aiden, came up with a fistful of napkins. The good news is that it is customary in Mexico to throw your butt wipings into the trash so it wasn’t a problem to wipe my ass with napkins, other than the fact that I had taken two previous dumps, and my anus was more vulnerable than Taylor Swift after her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Back in the day we went on a family vacation to Colorado and my parents went to the bank (or somewhere else) prior to our trip and secured a bunch of traveler’s checks. Looking back, traveler’s checks seem almost as practical as owning a phone book. Similarly, it used to be customary to exchange dollars for pesos, or whatever the currency in the foreign country may be. However, with the prevalence of credit cards, and the ability of everyone to take them, and the willingness of non business people to accept dollars (cab drivers, wait staff, prostitutes) exchanging currency was completely unnecessary. While part of my morning routine was Starbucks, part of my afternoon routine included Starbucks and a trip to Seven Eleven to get snacks. It took me until late Wednesday to determine what the actual exchange rate was. I may have gone the entire trip without knowing, but Parker and I stumbled upon a cool hat store in the same shopping plaza as the Starbucks and 7-11. I found a hat with a rooster on it and was going to buy it for my buddy I play pickle ball with because his nickname is the rooster for the way he struts around when he’s about to lose trying to intimidate his opponents. The hat was 890 pesos, could be $5 or could be $50. Turns out it was closer to $50, much closer. For every dollar you get 16.5 pesos. We were dropping close to 200 hundred pesos on bags of lays chips and munchers. A king size Cadbury chocolate bar was nearly ten dollars. Doing the math the next morning at Starbucks, I was dropping nearly $40 when my assistant butt wipers accompanied me.

The reality of what we had actually spent on frivolous things, when coupled with what we spent on the actual vacation, is the only reason I let Shirley talk me into doing a presentation to potentially join the Iberostar “Vacation Club”. When Shirley had scheduled one of our excursions they told her that if she did a tour with a salesperson we could get $150. Since she had already paid for the excursion they indicated it could be cold hard cash. She scheduled the 90 minute meeting for Friday, our last day there. We met them at the resort spa where we were first introduced to a women who obtained our information (which I am pretty sure they already had) in turn the women introduced us to our guide who we ate breakfast with. He then took us on a tour of the resort that involved the beach area that was sequestered off for the benefit of the vacation club members. The only real selling point was they served middle shelf liquor at this area instead of the kind that makes you shit your pants and never want to drink again if you manage to imbibe enough to get remotely intoxicated. After the tour he bought us back to the sales office where he told us we were going to meet his sales manager, I could barely contain myself I was so excited. The sales manager looked like someone you would encounter at one of the used car lots on south division or 28th street. They had a touch point presentation showing their various resorts after the introduction. We then sat down to crunch some numbers. At no point had they alluded to the cost of this but I told them early on, I am a bottom line guy, what does it cost. The sales guy said “don’t you want to know all of the benefits before you hear the price?” I should have said no, but I Just mumbled something intelligible.

They sat us down in a cubicle and the manger took a piece of scratch paper and a big calculator, the kind that dumb kids use in their Math 099 class in college, and started doing some pretty fuzzy math. There are three different levels you could buy into. The black, blue, and silver. Silver was ten years, blue, fifteen, and black 30. Similar to what they do at a car lot, they gave us the black sales spiel first. Here is the Navigator Black label, it’s $130,000. You take it for a ride and all you can think about is pulling up to the Chick-Fil-A drive thru in it. If you get past the fact of how ridiculous it is to pay that much for a vehicle, when they take you for a ride in the Aviator and tell you it’s 70k, it seems like a deal. If you are the type of person who wants to be seen in the Navigator ordering your Oreo shake and at all of your kids sporting events, it worked out either way for them, but probably not you when you drive your Navigator off the lot and it is immediately worth $109,000. I understood the math, I realized that if what they were saying was true, and I knew it wasn’t, there would be value in the vacation club depending on the price. On top of it all, they promised a buy back program in the upper two levels where you would get $500 per airline ticket for up to two tickets for your flights when you stayed at a resort. However, Shirley who once told the kids as they were watching Umi Zoomi (it’s a counting and math show for kids) on PBS that 3 times 0 is 3, was really struggling with all the basic math that was being thrown out and when the sales person said the upper level was $95,000, almost what your Lincoln Navigator depreciates to when you drive it off the lot, she told them she needed to leave to go take her Adderall.

Obviously, they don’t want you to leave, and when I told them that even if you get your 95k back at the end of the 30 years (I’d be 80) I could have done a lot more with it in the market than just getting that amount back. The guy realized we weren’t going black. So, they started working on the blue level. When they realized that wasn’t happening they decided to sweeten up the lowest level by adding five years to the membership at no additional cost and some hybrid form of the airline buy back program. Shirley indicated she wanted to take the contract with her and read it and the sales guy responded by saying the contract was copyrighted and he couldn’t allow her to do that. They already knew we were both attorneys so I am not sure why he thought that would be believable, a contract isn’t intellectual property that need to be protected. Seeing the sale going sideways, similar to when a husband has his wife in the sweet spot of intoxication at a gathering, knowing he is going to score, only to watch her get sloppy drunk, destroying any hopes of some moderately good sex after the party, the sales team brought in another guy who offered us some trial membership. Initially it was indicated to us that if we walked away the opportunity was gone. The sales team changed that to a noon deadline. The new guy told us a year.

Obviously, Shirley and I got up and walked away, like anyone with at least 3 functioning brain cells would do. However, and I knew this was a problem. The sales guy was as obtuse about the $150 when we were at breakfast, as his cohort was with the numbers he was using to make it seem like we would be making money by joining the time share, I mean vacation club. Since Shirley had gotten us into the mess I made her go to the lobby to retrieve our payment after we had eaten lunch. When she came back she was fired up, they had initially told her that the sales people were gone and she wasn’t going to get the $150. When that didn’t work they tried to come back and pay her in Iberostar bucks, nope, finally they relented to get the crazy white lady out of the lobby, and handed her $150. In hindsight I should have told them I’d sign up for the club if they added one perk. I needed a conjugal visit room to access at anytime I see fit (Which wouldn’t be a lot because Shirley would also need to be on board) so that I could have sex while staying at the resort. On the third day of the trip when we were at the pool I told Shirley we need to get the kids out of the room so we could have sex, surprisingly she agreed. I told the kids when I got back to the room a little ahead of Shirley that they were going to have to leave. The didn’t take it well but ultimately complied.

The week went by unsurprisingly fast and the Saturday after we arrived we had to wake up at 4 to get our ride to the airport. Again, we arrived with plenty of time to spare, allowing me to browse the duty free store. As Jerry Seinfeld would say “what’s the deal with Duty Free?” My kids have been on this kick obsessing about John Paul Gaultier cologne. Apparently it has gained quite a bit of steam because of the uniqueness of the bottle, which looks like a statute with no arms, legs, or head. I had a bottle of it 20 years ago and really liked it. So, when I found it at Nordstrom Rack for $30, I bought some more. It was $140 at duty free. The prices are worse than you would pay for the stuff under normal circumstances and it’s a pain in the ass to tote the stuff you buy there along with you on the rest of your journey. And as far as toting stuff along with you. We had to go through customs as well as your usual TSA check. I have no idea how people who have 7 balloons of heroin shoved up their ass can act all calm, cool, and collected. I have a t-shirt I bought and forget to declare with Customs and I’m sweating bullets worried I’m going to spend 3 to 5 years in a Mexican prison. I’m really glad I didn’t buy that rooster hat.