I Never Considered Myself the Resort Type.... Until Now

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My parents have owned timeshares in Mexico for years, and every year they wanted us to go with them. This year we took them up on their offer after realizing that with a new baby on the way, it might be a while before we'd be able to take another family vacation. So my parents, my sister and my family of 3 headed down to Mexico for a 14-day all-inclusive resort vacation.

Due to the hurricane Katrine last year, several resorts in Cancun were damaged, including the usual ones my parents' frequent. So this year they decided to try out a new resort within their timeshare group - Vallarta Palace - that opened only in June 2005.

Getting There

Although we had lots of offers from people for rides to the airport, we decided - since our flight was early in the morning - to take advantage of a website called Park, Sleep and Fly that specializes in finding accomodations near airports that with a nights stay, gives you a special rate on parking. Although I didn't book directly through them (you need to book a few weeks in advance to get the best selection), I did find the hotel I needed for the number of nights of parking required. A lot of the hotels will also give you a good rate on additional days of parking if necessary, and a complimentary continental breakfast.

My parents did the same thing in Seattle - so instead of a $900 airfare from Vancouver to Puerto Vallarta, they drove down to Seattle stayed over night, parked their car and save $550 per person! In fact, they're flights were cheaper than ours from SFO, even though we connected onto the same flight!

Okay, so enough about the how we got there. We arrived in Puerto Vallarta at around 3pm their time (2 hours ahead of PT). Thanks to instructions sent by the resort company to my dad, we were quickly wisked away in taxi to the resort.

Our Arrival and Stay

We were greeted with champagne, strapped ourselves with our resort wristbands and were given the keys to our rooms. We had a magnificant room - one of the only with a full balcony - although all the rooms had a view directly onto the ocean, which was only about 30 meters away. At night we just left the doors open so that we could lull ourselves to sleep with the waves crashing against the shore.

I really did not consider myself a "lie-on-the beach-and-drink-pina -coladas-all-day-long" kind of girl. I'm more of the exploratory type of traveler - trying the occasional adventure sport and walking endless miles through a foreign city. But with an 17-month old and me being 6 months pregnant, I thought I'd give this - an all inclusive resort - a try.

And you know, this is great for people who:

a) just want a place to do nothing but eat, sleep and relax on a beach all day

b) families with kids that require some cordined off area in which to run around in, and maybe some activities

c) people who might want to try several different activies while on holidays and might not want to have to do all the booking and renting themselves.

And I have to admit, except for the fact that I wasn't able to partake in the all-inclusive alcohol portion of the stay, everything else was absolutely wonderful. My daughter and I drank virgin pina coladas all day long, intermingled with swimming (both pool and ocean) and playing in the sand.  Food was always available from somewhere. We didn't take part in any of scheduled activies per se, although my husband found a new love in boogie boarding and I had a chance to do one of the only sports I could being a pregnant as I was - sea kayaking - which was loads of fun!

There were 4 restaurants in the resort - Mexican, Brazilian, Italian and Oriental. Being there for 2 weeks, we got try try each one several times. For breakfast and lunches they were all the same buffet-syle - although the Mexican one had the most selection on a regular basis. For dinners, just depended what you felt like but all were generally good. The servers were definitely there to please you and it was pretty cool that you could just order bottles of wine to the table without concern of price or consumption (again, I just had water...).

There was a hotel dance team that seemed to work non-stop as the aerobics instructors at lunch, the salsa instructors at 3pm, and the nightly entertainment. Some of the shows were really good - others only okay. But overall, not bad.

Although our daily routines were fairly basic - eat breakfast, go to the pool, eat lunch, nap, go to the beach, have a jucuzzi bubble bath, go to dinner, catch a show (if daughter's interest and sleep level permitted) and go to bed - we did manage a couple of extra activies most included in our all-inclusive package:

1) City Tour of Puerto Vallarta
2) Sunset Cruise (this was really cool and we got to see dolphins!)
3) Spa Treatments (sooooooo relaxing.......)
4) Trip to Walmart - to pick up as much Kahlua as we could bring back, and a VERY popular destination with tourists - more foreigners at this Walmart than Mexicans.
5) Trip into Puerto Vallarta 'sans' tourgroup - a must to really get the feel of a city (which by the way, reminded me a lot of Bangkok just a little less dirty).

And that was about it. Would I do it again?  Definitely, especially with younger kids as it's an easy place for them to run around in without too much worry (especially after experiencing the narrow sidewalks and crazy traffic of the city). Plus, I can't say that I would have tried sea kayaking otherwise, nor boogie boarding for my husband.

A most relaxing and enjoyable holiday.