Jake and January's Excellent Adventure

As I write this I'm sitting out on the balcony of our hotel in Cozumel. For the last week we've been staying in the pueblo only a block from the ocean, but the shady courtyard here feels very contained and separate from the chaos of the main drag. I'm gradually moving my chair farther and farther to the right to remain in the shade as the sun makes its steady traverse of the cloudless sky. The sound of someone playing violin has been drifting across the rooftops for the last few minutes. The music is somber, but not mournful. It's a welcome break from the usual sounds of the neighborhood - reggaeton and mariachi music, barking dogs, hammering from the new construction that's steadily rebuilding the old town into something taller, sleeker, more modern, less alive. January left for Park City, UT yesterday morning to spend the next week hiking with her mom before we meet up back in NH. The high in Park City right now is right around freezing. A temperature that's h...

This past week we said goodbye to our lovely apartment in Akumal and all the wonderful and unique features it brought us: families of monkeys swinging through the trees, a refreshing pool to help break the mid-day heat, a great deck for watching the sun rise, a washer and dryer that sometimes worked, stray dogs to chase us on our morning runs. (Okay, maybe the last one was a little stressful.)  We are heading over for one last week of diving in Cozumel before we return to the States (!!!) and this seemed like a good time for a little photo tribute to some of the animals we've met during our time in Akumal. All of these animals have names - some of them given by their respective humans, some of them given by me.  Lizzy enjoys the sunshine at the Tulum Ruins. Taco has a favorite chair at Turtle /bay Cafe. Hugo belongs to Arja, our dive instructor, and is my favorite dog in Mexico. Mr. Tickles wanted to live in our bedroom, but we asked him to leave. Slinky is a boa constrictor, ...

After a lovely two week excursion to Cozumel to celebrate my dad's 75th birthday (Happy Birthday, Pop!) with the rest of the family, January and I came back to the mainland and jumped straight into the second half of our Cavern course. It was four long days of running guidelines and practicing skills in zero visibility. One of the sites we used for training is a cenote called Orquidea. It's set way back off a jungle road behind an unmarked gate that you can't enter without the key to the padlock. Many of the cenotes that we use for training are close to the highway, have gift shops and snack stands, and just feel pretty touristy. The glory days of trekking through the jungle with your gear to reach the cenote entrance are mostly gone now. Orquidea, however, has a bit more of that old school feel to it. As we bounced our way along what could only be considered a road in the very loosest sense, I imagined what it must have been like here in the early 1990s when the majority o...