Thursday, December 13 (Pat)

We woke up just before the alarm went off after a good night’s sleep. We showered and got ready for ‘The 90 minute presentation.’ We met a couple in the van on the way to Sunset Lagoon. They were from San Diego and had been traveling in Florida before coming to Cancun and had traveled to Peru and other areas – three months each year! Now that’s a great lifestyle. So we got set up with our presentation host. Alma – a talkative Mexicana. Very nice, and interesting. We got a tour of the resort. A huge, marble floored condo with a big living area, a separate two bed bedroom and then upstairs to the master bedroom. Very luxurious! We had breakfast – a very nice buffet with lots of food – then went outside to see the pool and the pool and the yachts. As an owner at the resort, for seventy-five dollars an hour you could tool around on the yacht. A nice sitting area, small bed area and a larger sleeping area. Very posh! Fishing in style. Then we took the water taxi over to Sunset Plaza on the beach. The suite there was a lock-off suite with a beautiful view of the beach and Caribbean sea. Then the ‘fun’ began. Alma explained how vacation ‘ownership’ was a good deal for developing equity. There was the usual start high with the $149,000 option, but maybe the $89,000 version would fit our budget better. Give the extra weeks to marketing and make money ‘cause they will rent the suite for $1500 per week. Where have we heard that before! We had told them that we just owned at the Mayan Palace. Alma kept putting down the timeshares, showing how much money we were going to be losing, etc. They even offered to give us $7500 off if we gave them the Mayan Palace. No! Then it was down to $10,900. Then $7,500, then $4,500, then $2,500 and some final offer I wasn’t even listening to. We kept saying now was not the time we wanted to take on anymore debt. If we didn’t own 6 timeshares already and this was the first presentation we had heard ti would have been easy to cave in. I started zoning out after a while. When they finally gave up and signed off our sheet so we could leave it was 2pm. The couple we had met in the van ride over had ‘escaped’ as well. They are regular presentation goers and said this was one of the hardest sales presentations they had been to. So I’m glad we got out of there without signing on for more lies and promises that don’t come about.

We spent what was left of the afternoon having lunch at the Laguna Suites. Ron had the Aracherra Padilla and I had the Fajitas con Pollo. Both good and filling. Finally a chance to sit in the sun and read. We asked to have some chairs brought out to the patch of sun on the west side by the golf course. Fortunately we didn’t get hit by an errant golf ball. We moved into the pool area when the sun was stuck behind some low clouds. We chatted with a couple from Medicine Hat, Alberta about their presentation adventures. More reading until it was too dim to read and back into the room. I worked on the laptop – sorting some dentistry photos into groups for my next project. We played music since Ron brought the hard drive loaded up with lots of music. There is internet wireless but you have to pay for two days so I will wait until Friday. About 8pm we decided we were getting hungry. The Laguna Suites dining area was full so we had a drink and sat by the pool. A very pleasant evening temperature, no breeze – starting to unwind and relax more. Pretty soon we got seated at a double table where a woman and her daughter were that came in right before us. “Can we separate the tables” she asked the waiter. Ron and I looked at each other and separated the tables a bit. Later on in the dinner she was scrutinizing the bill and making comments and coming across as a NY bitch. We enjoyed dinner. I had only the green salad so I could enjoy some dessert. Pastel con queso. The older waiter enjoys it when we speak Spanish. Ron had Kukulcan soup, chicken tacos, and pastel de coco. (That’s cheesecake for Pat, coconut pie for Ron.) Then off to the room. More reading and log writing. Then I started working on the log in the bedroom and turned on the TV. I found the Jim Carey movie “Liar, Liar” with Spanish subtitles. The movie is very funny and it was a good way to learn various Spanish ‘bad’ words. Cretino! Maldito! Merida! for a few. It was after midnight when we crawled into bed. Ron found the E! channel so we watched the Playboy’s three girlfriends and went to sleep.

(Note from Ron: The E! channel on cable in the states blurs out any chances of nudity and beeps any bad language. In Mexico they don’t seem to do that so it was kind of interesting!)