Accommodations

So, this is where we stayed.  It was donated to our school auction by Terry Emmeret of Emmeret International and we bid on it {and won}. It was described as a 4 bedroom 3 bath home and we were excited to go. We invited Gerri & James and my Mom to come along with us and I called right away to book it for spring break and then purchased our airline tickets {11 months ahead of time} and thought we were set to go and never gave it another thought. Until.... a few days before we were scheduled to fly out I made email contact with Lisa {our English speaking contact there in Mazatlan} who emailed me back confirming that we were book into a 2 bedroom 3 bath penthouse - Um..... excuse me but I thought we had 4 bedrooms???? Turns out they over booked the place and they had moved us to the penthouse {Terry Emmeret's personal vacation home} which would be great except for the fact that they forgot to ask how many people we had in our party. It was a tough squeeze - 8 people in a 2 bedroom place, and if that wasn't enough because it is Terry Emmeret's personal vacation home his items {socks and stuff - I didn't look too closely, I was afraid of what I might find} so we could not unpack for the entire trip. It made for a lot of clutter and mess. On the bright side, it was right on the beach, where we spent most of our time and in the end that is what I keep telling myself - we had sun, sand, & ocean right our our back door....Oh, and the fact that it was his privet vacation home the cabinets were full of spices, coffee filters & other everyday needs.

There where other issues too:

• the air mattress hey gave us for the kids to sleep on had a leak so even though we filled it up they were sleeping on the floor for two nights.
  
• we were promised cots for them to sleep on but when we returned that evening the cots were not in our room and the guy at the desk spoke NO English and had no idea what I was talking about {the was the 2nd night they slept on the floor}
• after playing in the sand most of the day Terry tried to shower the girls only to find out that we didn't have any hot water {water heater ended up broken and they had to fix it so we had hot water by the end of the 2nd day}
• by the 4th day or so the pool in our courtyard looked disgusting {turns out the pool filter was broken and never really got fixed before we left}
•  we had no water one morning and when we got the water back we had no electricity

The people staying below us {in the house we were meant to be in} left on Fri. and we chatted with Lisa about moving downstairs. She said that we could but when we returned to the house later in the afternoon she was gone and my favorite non-English speaking desk clerk initially refused to help. We finally did manage to move {with the help of a tip to house keeping} but in the end Im not sure it was so much better. We had more beds to sleep in but the living room furniture was very uncomfortable {which made it hard to hang out together} and the bed Terry and I slept on was hard as a rock and when we went to cook we realized just how good the kitchen upstairs was stalked. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to complain. I was thrilled to miss all the rain, snow, sleet & hail that Oregon experienced and to come home with a tan but we {Terry & I} realized something about ourselves. We prefer a few more amenities when we travel. Oh, our pool that was so gross, well it never got fixed but the hotel {if you can call it that} had a pool and towards the end of the week the kids started spending time there so at least we had a clean pool.