A beach day in Chelem

A blogger's work is never done. I'm already posting two days late! Trying to get caught up today with some down time at home.

We were blessed with some sunshine on Friday so we headed out to explore the beaches at Chelem, a sleepy little fishing village just west of Progresso. This is certainly a more remote area, and one can imagine how easy it would be to drop out of society by settling here. The roads turn to sand as you drive closer to the shore, so we found one where we could pull up and make camp in relative isolation.

The beaches in this section of Chelem are not particularly wide, so we chose the concrete patio of a vacant hotel to drop our belongings and have lunch. The kids spent much of the time playing in the sand and combing the beach for seashells. The plan is to string them together to make necklaces. Occasionally, giant pelicans flew by overhead, usually when the camera was put away in the beach bag. Lukas calls them pterodactyls.

Later, we explored the shoreline and encountered several buildings that clearly suffered extensive damage due to previous hurricanes. Beach erosion has claimed a good amount of sand from this stretch of Chelem, but other areas seemed to fare much better. Jenn chose the wrong spot to cool off in the water, because she cut her foot on a boulder sized rock on her way out. Much different from the beaches we encountered in Progreso, where the bottom was silky smooth sand.

No afternoon showers on this day, so we got a good deal of sun before heading back to the casa. That night we enjoyed some Yucatecan cuisine in the open air courtyard of Amaro, under a clear and star-filled sky. We enjoyed some margaritas and I tried my first chaya shake, which was pretty tasty. Chaya is a leafy green herb that is native to the Yucatan and has more nutrients that spinach (so it's sometimes called Tree Spinach). Although the raw leaves are toxic, the cyanide they contain cooks out and becomes a traditional drink. That's me, living on the edge! Of course, Jenn doesn't tell me these things ahead of time, so maybe she's just looking for an insurance payout so she can settle down here full time.

Some live latin music drew lots of other patrons to the restaurant, so we spent most of an hour trying to get our check once it was time to go. When in Mexico, you're on Mexico time!