The view from the room. Let's orient ourselves, shall we?

#1 on the bottom is our location. The banner is our view. Two is the lunch spot by the beach, near the gym. Three is the Village, with most of the restaurants. You can see the Tennis Center on the upper right. This is 45 minutes north of Cancun proper. The TRS Coral is part of the Grand Palladium, with specially-tinted wristbands to let you know where you stand in the heirarchy.

I have yet to tire of this place.

The area around the main restaurant and lobby:

I had a sudden pang of doubt last night before falling asleep: that piece of paper we got from the machine after using the electronic entry.

Where was it? Ah, probably didn’t matter. But just to be sure. I made a note to find it the next morning. I found wife’s in the trash. The text explained that without this, one would not be allowed to leave the country.

Well, seems a rather important document, then. And where was mine? Surely in my passport holder or the document holder.

It was not.

Well, surely this happened all the time, people lost them, they couldn’t just say “there’s no proof you didn’t parachute into Cancun with your luggage and met up with a spouse who came by legitimate means” and then extort you for the ExtraVisiTax or something to expedite the process. No way that would happen in Mexico. Not to worry.

Check the wallet . . . ah. I had set it aside. Good! Now I pitied the stupid people who just tossed them away. No, carve out wifely exception for that. I still can’t believe she tossed it.

(Checked the Cancun subreddit; happens all the time, no big deal at all.)

Currently at the bar for the 4 PM Coffee. I had hoped to see Valentin, the bartender who remembered me and made an excellent Americano. No Valentin. Then again, it’s 5:51. Could be that.

I asked: he’s on vacation, says the bartender. “Paris.”

Paris? France?

“Si, Paris. He send picture with the big tower.”

Little guy makes enough here to go to France. Good for him. The gym guy was gone too. Maybe they took the trip together.

Absolutely standard day. Perfection and happiness. The beach, then Poseidon with Wife for lunch. I’m not going to tread on your time discussing the particulars, because there aren’t any. Perhaps this is the year for tedious meal descriptions?

No, that’s boring, although you might be interested to know we went to Helios, last night the Med restaurant that could be called Hedious if it was really bad, but it isn’t. And we had the lot. Mr. Creosote style. Wife wondered if she should have the lobster stew or the mushroom risotto, and I reminded her: you can have everything.

Garlic Shrimp with Poor Potatoes. I don’t know why they were impoverished. It seems an odd adjective, and makes you think they’re bad, as in “that’s a poor excuse for a potato.” Four big shrimp. They had pieces of red something I was excited to think could be pepper flakes, but turned out to tissue paper, I think.

Bread with jambon. This was interesting. A cold hunk of bread about an inch tall, smeared on top with something that wanted to be cream cheese but never finished the coursework required to get the honor, and then a rivulet of the same stuff running through the bread. Topped with lots of desiccated ham that fell off when you cut it. Wife hated it; I was mildly neutral.

Arugula salad. A very small amount of arugula atop a bed a corn and peas, topped with a piece of mozzarella that was, in scale, like an illustration of a meteor striking the earth. I liked it. Wife had the goat cheese salad, which had a similar cheese-green ratio.

The lobster stew. She made a face, and said that while there had been lobster near the dish at some point, the primary ingredient was flour. I took a spoon and found it very lobster forward, perhaps suspiciously so.

The risotto. If it joined Unca Donald’s troupe of nephews, it would be known as Gluey.

Her main was a lamb something or other - I can’t remember the term. Tajine. She said it was not that at all, but it was good. My main was a thick slice of fish with hot aioli, and it was very good.

For afters we split an espresso-pistachio mousse; it arrived in the shape of a small mouse encased in a carapace of chocolate. She dared me to find the pistachio flavor amongst the rich notes of espresso. I agreed that it was obscure, until I pointed out the crumbs on the plate. Might they be artfully arranged pulverized pistachios? They were! Apparently we were expected to assemble it ourselves.

All told, a solid B.

Note: they’re all solid Bs.

Monday. Dinner #2. La Boheme, the high-end French restaurant.

The dinner: it began with fondue for wife, and a duck pate with brioche for me. The brioche was fossilized; I nearly cracked a tooth. The pate did not look, walk, or quack like a duck, so it was no surprise it did not taste like duck. Had a nice crumble of chorizo, though. The French onion soup arrived wearing a moist hat of bread.

Wife had the coq-a-vin, ordering it with a mixture of hope and pre-figured regret; I had the fish, having been burned on the chateaubriand our previous visit. (It is difficult to be burned by something that was lukewarm, I suppose.) My fish was quite good, and she made do with the coq. Dessert was a creme brulee for her, and it had been pre-caramelized for her convenience a week or so before - it being cool, she just considered it flan and we moved along. I had a delicious thick chocolate thing.

All things considered, a solid B.

There was a fellow at the piano providing gentle digestive accompaniment. Somewhere between the fondue and the main course he stopped. At one point I became aware that the piano music was bad, bad, and when I looked over to the piano I saw a blonde woman with long crinkly hair in a white outfit sitting at the piano with a slightly unfocussed expression, attempting to play the them from “Love Story.” She was not good. My wife looked over and said she thought the woman was part of a clique of Canadian ladies who were also in the tennis program.

After many hesitant and inaccurate notes I got up and walked over and said:

“Excuse me, but you don’t work here?”

She looked up, a bit jangled. “I don’t have my sheet music,” she said.

“Your notes are wrong,” I said. “It’s not pleasant for everyone.” She stared at me. “Your notes are wrong,” I repeated. She got up and waved her arms and tottered away. I returned to my seat and saw the nods of gratitude from other diners. (And everyone clapped, as the fake stories go)

During the dessert she returned with ten or more other Canadian blondes all in white and the piano player started banging out the chords to “Phantom of the Opera” and they all yelled along: duh, duh-duh-duh duh duh

One of the adjacent diners said to me that they were all in white, and I was all in white, I could join in. So I got up and walked over and stood at the periphery of their group and declaimed duh, duh-duh-duh duh duh in a Peter-Boyle-as-Frahnkensteens-Monster voice, but it had no effect. On the way out I noted to the manager that this was most ridiculous, and he reacted like a beaten dog. He knew, but was powerless.

An hour later we were up at the Gravity bar to hear the band. It's very stark and modern. Fun when it fills up. It is not always filled up.

Then the entire Canadian Women on a Tennis Vacation cohort shows up. I was informed by someone else we'd just met that there were 25 of them, and they hopped around from one international venue to another, landing like a cloud of blonde locusts. The Terrible Twenty-Five. The band kicks in, and they all get out and dance, some doing a Granny-Clampett dance that looked like someone threw a string of firecrackers into a chicken coop, some moving aimlessly and whooooo-hooing with upraised arms, one doing a series of ridiculous pre-programmed I AM EROS, I AM THE NIGHT moves, and Piano Blonde thrashing around in a fashion that made you hope they had a stick she could bite down upon until the seizure passed. One by one they took the mike to gal-power tunelessly through a karaoke number.

The world loves a happy girl; the world is mildly annoyed by 25 of them. You get 25 guys in a bar listening to Topp or Zepp, and there’s lot of nodding going on, and that's about it. At no point does a guy get up and mime a lap dance for his bros, is all I’m saying.