My friend Senga and I went on a week long, girl's vacation to Huatulco, Mexico!I guess it’s pretty standard for vacation travel to start at an ungodly hour. However, I can understand why. People want to start their vacations ASAP. My flight to Huatulco departed this morning at 6:30 am. The airlines recommend you arrive at the airport 3 hours before your departure time. There is no way in hell I was going to be at the airport at 3:30 am. I’m sure the security line up would not be an issue before the break of dawn. I arrived at the airport to 4:45 am and that was plenty of time to check-in, eat breakfast, get a snack, and grab a magazine to read on the plane. I even had a mini nap before boarding. As some of you may already know, business travel and leisure travel vastly differ. For this trip, I’m flying on Sunwings, a charter flight, and service sucks hole. However, I think that is to be expected so I can’t say that I am disappointed. Typically, if the service is good on these charters, I am pleasantly surprised. I think the flight attendants are the rejects from all the other non-charter airlines. Even the safety demo seemed ghetto to me some how. They were using old, crusty belt buckles and faded yellow and somewhat smelly looking, plastic air masks. You know when clear plastic tubes have yellowed and the plastic that is supposed to be soft is hard and brittle? That’s what the air mask looked like. The elastic used to hold the mask to your face was tattered and worn. The elastic strap is supposed to be white but this demo one had a brown tinge to it. Nasty.
Here is the extent of the mediocre service from Sunwings:
a) There were only working toilet in the back of the plane. Hello people, this is vacation so the passengers are boozing away and low and behold there is now a long, long queue to wait in to deplete oneself. Holy-mama-jamma was the line up long! At times I’d say the line up was 15 people deep. Multiply 15 people by 3 minutes per person (I think that is being conservative!) and you have a 45 minute bathroom line-up! Good thing I elected to sleep during most of the flight and watch my downloaded TV shows on my lap top.
b) Because of the long queue down the isle of the plane, the flight attendants had a hard time serving meals. Needless to say, Senga and I didn't get a meal until we managed to waive one of them down to let them know they missed us in the food service. I'm sure someone spat a loogie in my already awful plane food. I am now certain something was wrong with our food because Senga became violently ill one we got off the plane. She pretty much up-chucked her entire lunch in the airport bathroom.
c) Also because of the bathroom issue, passengers who wanted to get drinks (water, juice, beer and whatever else) had to walk to the galley to get their own drinks. The toilet queue blocked the isle so drink carts could not be used.
My hope was the resort would be much better than our flight to Mexico. I plan on some solid rest and relaxation in addition to becoming a darker race! Hellllooooo sunshine, here we come!
Senga and I thought we should try and get off the beat ‘n path and do something fun so we decided to rent an ATV and take a trail into the jungle. It’s the dry season so the riverbeds we travelled along were mostly dried up and there was a hell of a lot of dirt and dust! The ATV trail was pretty fun! Good terrain with steep areas and some rough patches to manoeuvre around. I drove the ATV as Senga’s wrist was sore. She kept saying to me that this was an exercise in trust for her. Mostly because I didn’t believe in using the brakes when we were going down the hills. She kept saying to me “Nancy, brakes are our friends!” as I barreled down the hills. She will fully admit that she has some control issues so being a passenger while I was driving like a maniac probably didn’t help. Never have never I lost such blood circulation in my arms and legs from someone hanging on so, so very tightly! It was like someone gripping on to a thigh-master!
