2013 Vacation

Savanna and I were lucky enough to be able to go on a vacation to the Western Caribbean. We went to two ports on the Yucatan peninsula, in Progreso and a little island called Cozumel.

Progreso, Mexico

     We were scared for the weather because we booked our cruise during the hurricane season. Two days before we left there was a 50% chance of a hurricane or tropical storm or something like that developing around Cozumel. Luckily when we got there it wasn't too bad.

      Our first stop in Progreso turned out to be beautiful weather. Despite being just a little fishing town,  it has some amazing beaches (like the picture above). We got to go haggle with the locals, take a little tour around the town in the top of a double-decker bus.
                It felt pretty authentic just because we had to dodge power lines...

In Cozumel we had booked an excursion. Turns out we were the only ones that did it through the company.
So it was just us and the tour guide.
It wasn't the best weather, but because of the rain and wind we got to get a free excursion upgrade and see more of the island. It led us to some very beautiful places.  

We passed by some volunteers that were saving baby sea turtles.

Duuuuude, there were a lot of those little squirts :p

The volunteers said that when they flipped onto their backs they left them. That was so they wouldn't waste energy crawling around. They had about a 5 mile journey back to the safe parts of the oceans.

The Volunteers had marked all the nests along the beach. It was 100% covered.

   We got to stop at some shops that had nice views.
   

And this is where it gets REAAALLY cool. We went to a lighthouse. But this lighthouse was built where the Mayans used to have one of their own.

Ok now the coolness. The Mayans had also built this warning signal tower place. It was built so they could signal the people back on the mainland how many people they were sending over, how many people to send back, but the coolest part was....it would tell the weather. At the spring equinox the sun would line up directly between those little squares on top. And because of the way they had lined it up, when the wind was blowing in a storm it would change directions and blow in such a way that it would make a noise up in the top part of this tower like a conch shell.
There used to be more to that little round part, and each side facing a cardinal direction had four little holes.
Pretty sweet!

We also got to go SNORKELING!!!!!! It was pretty awesome. 

My favorite part. 

It started raining on us and for fear of a storm we didn't get to go for too long. But it was still great. I made a cute little video of it :)