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The Grand Scale of Xcanatun

It’s a little embarrassing for Bruce and Mary to admit, but they have been down here in Mérida for over a year and a half and they have never been to a hacienda until yesterday. Let’s see how that went.

Being it is Saturday and we are more or less working stiffs, working M-F, we sleep in. It is nice to have our weekends back, after so long without that structure. It takes working to appreciate not working, I guess.

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After a late morning breakfast of papaya, banana, watermelon, mamay, avocado on toast and for me the mandatory sardine dessert, we head to California gym for a righteous workout. Then we have lunch at Lulu’s, a cocina economica, for 40P and then, as our Saturday routine dictates, we walk on up to Wal-Mart. We have checked out all the other supermarkets and they all have trade-offs so we just keep coming here for the convenience. We stock up on our weekly necessities, hail a cab with our heavy load and pay the 20P, about $1.50 to get whisked to our door.

After a quick dip in the pool to cool off and a shower to clean up we hit the street to find our way to Hacienda Xcanatun. We would like to have an early dinner there.

We walk down Calle 56 to the Combi staging area between Calle 57 and 59 and we are motioned into the last combi in the queue. We are the first ones in and we have actually acquired a sense of Mexican time. We pay the new higher fee of 6P each (it was 5P for combis or city buses just yesterday) and we don’t mind relaxing for the 20 minutes or so before we take off although it is about 36° (97°F). We cruise north on Calle 60, the main drag of Mérida and the driver calls out for Gran Plaza and Liverpool, two giant modern shopping centers, but nobody is getting off there.

At Kilometer 13 just a few miles north of town we take the Xcanatun exit and start winding our way through town. The last guy we picked up on the way out of town is chatting and just discovering that this is not the Progreso combi. It’s nice to know that even locals can screw up navigating the city combis and buses. We circle the small Pueblo of Xcanatun and soon find ourselves heading to the main highway once again. Mary and I look at each other as the driver pulls over to let out the poor slob who thought he was going to Progreso and I holler out, “Donde esta Hacienda Xcanatun?” The family man with his three kids who are heading into town tells us it is only 2 blocks back down the main drag. We thought the driver would have called out “Hacienda Xcanatun” just as he did for the Gran Plaza and Liverpool stops. Wrong again.

Well, we get out and wonder if this will be the first time we get correct directions from a local and we are not disappointed as it is a helluva lot further than 2 blocks but we do find it and of course we had driven right by it. We are greeted by a concierge of sorts in the parking lot and directed to the restaurant part of this huge complex.

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This is not a working hacienda. By that I mean this hacienda is no longer in the production of rope from the henequen Captain Corellis Mandolin ipod plant. Many of the Haciendas in the Yucatan, and the villages that serve them, sprang up in the 18^th century to satisfy the worldwide need for rope in all industries, particularly shipping. This created generations of wealth and it is reported that at one time there were more millionaires in Mérida than any other city in the world. But then came synthetics and land reform and although there are still a few working haciendas in the Yucatan, most were abandoned but many of those were renovated into luxury resorts which has been the fate of Hacienda Xcanatun.

We enter the restaurant and are greeted at the door by the maître d. We are assigned a server dressed in black slacks and black dress shirt who gives us the choice of dining in air conditioned comfort or dining on the beautiful patio overlooking the grounds. It is about 5:00 and moderately busy. But we are the only ones to opt for a view instead of the a/c.

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A Toast at Xcanatun

We order a couple beers, a Tecate, Michilada style, for Mary and a Bohemia for me, and we contemplate the menu. I order the Filete de Res and Mary has Pechuga de Pollo Dorada. Mary’s dish is a chicken breast over a combination of risotto and esquites, a Yucatecan corn treatment. It is very good. My dish is a two inch thick fillet mignon, done a perfect medium rare, over whipped garlic potatoes and smothered in mushrooms and onions. With a hint of a wine marinade it is absolutely sumptuous! We eat at a very leisurely pace, which I am getting better at now that I am acquiring Mary’s European style of utensil employment. Someone once asked me, “Do you come from a large family?” “Well, yes.” “That explains why you eat so fast.”

Our server asks if we desire any dessert and of course we are stuffed. We ask for La Cuenta, the check, and it comes to 582P with tip, about $44. FYI, tips down here are 10% standard and 15% for fancy places.

On our way out we are admiring the décor of the lobby and the bar within when the barkeep tells us to get behind the bar which we do and he has one of the staffers take our picture while one of the servers orders three cokes from us. These people enjoy their jobs.

Bruce and Mary Tending Bar at Xcanatun

Out the door we decide to check out the Hotel lobby just a few steps to the east. The receptionist speaks excellent English and gives us a rate card. The fanciest of the 18 suites are called “Masters” and cost $340US/night. She offers us a tour and the same concierge type fellow shows up momentarily and leads us on a walking tour of the grounds. We start with a tour of a Master suite which must be 1200 square feet. It has an ornate wardrobe and mini fridge in a small wooden hutch. The bathroom area, complete with bidet, shower, and Jacuzzi, is a half level up from the rest of the suite so as to look out over the massive bed.

Then we are led on meandering paving stone paths that weave through a tropical garden with huge Ceiba and Tamarind trees with towering Royal palms defining the main walkways. We are shown complexes containing suites and common areas, the two swimming pools, the spa, and the requisite cenote.

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Xcanatun's Cenote

Walking over a small bridge we can see large carp swimming among the Lily pads. Finally our personal tour ends at the monstrous Ceiba tree bordering the parking lot. We give our thanks and head on our way.

It starts to rain lightly so we shelter under a tree on the main drag of town. In just a few minutes a combi comes by and we flag it down for our ride back into town.

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We are both quiet on the ride home as we have a bit of sensory overload to deal with. We are very glad to have experienced Hacienda Xcanatun and can’t wait to bring our visiting friends and family to this wonderful place.

Thanks for visiting gentle reader. As always Bruce welcomes your commentary and promises to respond, very quickly, to all inquiries. Hasta Pronto!

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Bruce & Mary Enjoying the Good Life in Merida

Bruce and Mary have reached the 1 ½ year mark of their escape to México and are happy to report that they are still on the lam. Bruce is feeling a little introspective this day.

It seems like a long time ago that we were stuffing the last of our belongings into storage on a nasty -20° Minnesota day and hopping a one way flight to Mérida.

We spent the first month on the beach in Chicxulub courtesy of arrangements made through Jaromey, the lovely Canadian Francophone property manager who is now one of our best friends, which seems somewhat karmic as she is the very first person we met down here. We successfully decompressed to the point of nearly forgetting our names.

Then came our move to Mérida and the earnest hunt for an income property, a B&B ideally. We moved to Calle 59 in the la Corazon

, the heart of downtown with the nicest man on earth, abogado, attorney Fernando as our landlord. Freshly moved into our one bedroom flat we investigated a B&B on the coast in Chuburna and actually made an offer and  the owners were willing to finance. We thought our dream had come true until that awful anxiety filled night wondering if, now that our longtime dream was within our grasp did we really want to run another business, worried every month about cracking the nut? Didn’t we come down here to escape just that very thing, an anxious sell, sell, sell, bottom line American life? When we finally faced the reality of our dream, it shattered into ragged shards. We withdrew our offer.

Now what? We started networking through the monthly Nafta and Mérida English Library MELO Night mixers and without even trying I found myself with a sweet deal at a gym and a handful of personal training clients and Mary was teaching English as a Second Language at the CIS school on Calle 52. Through this networking we also started our career in house-sitting, the first opportunity offered to us before we had really even heard of house-sitting down here. We (make that I) finally discovered that, if you don’t push for things they will come. This is a foreign concept for me, as I have always thought you had to actively and aggressively pursue your goals, even if you didn’t really even know what those goals are, as evidenced by the whole B&B debacle. Mérida was showing us the love and we consciously decided to just go with the flow for as long as it lasted.

The next thing we knew, we were involved in writing the book, Living in Mérida

, for Mérida Verde, a non-profit, and we were, in the Mérida gringo society, minor celebrities for a time, attending book signings and high society parties where our common Minnesota roots only increased our allure to the gringo elite.

Through these associations we entered into an agreement with Harley and Myrna from SF to house-sit the small hotel of a house that we call home, now. And we are working stiffs again. If you can call it work, sitting at our computers poolside. But we are putting in six hours a day now and we actually have an income which has made our old business plan of miserly spend down and living like paupers (with suntans), obsolete.

In fact I did a cash flow analysis of our situation now compared to our old conventional lives in Minnesota and came to a startling conclusion. But first, this is how I did it: I took our old income, net after taxes (our ICUC income down here is exempt from taxes according to IRS section 911) and subtracted our mortgage pmt, our car expenses, our life insurance premiums (we cashed in our life insurance when we came down here – we’re told old for life insurance), health insurance (we can afford to be without down here), the premium we paid for entertainment and groceries in the States, and finally utilities (we pay none in our house-sitting agreement) Then I added up our projected ICUC income and added the positive cash flow from the lease of our St. Cloud house and you know what I found? Annually, we are about $3500 ahead of what we were in our old lives and we live in paradise. This kind of math can make you feel pretty good for awhile.

But we have painted ourselves into a corner. This happy equation only works down here. We love it here but we won’t be here forever. Two of our kids are getting married next summer (Congrats Helen and Sammy!) and you know how it goes: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes….. And there is no way we will be able to keep Mary out of the US when grand babies come.

Most of the equation for transitioning back will not be that difficult but the one real hurdle will be health insurance. Self employed as a contractor for ICUC I cannot afford $1500+ monthly health insurance premiums, if I can even get

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Unstoppable movie The Big Nothing move insurance with a heart attack in my history. Back in Minnesota, despite being the gambler that I am, I will not roll the dice on going without health insurance. So here’s hoping there is real health care reform before we come back. I could go on a campaign here but I won’t, I will just say the whole rest of the western world (including México) has universal health care, why don’t we? And for those of you that call that socialism, I ask what do you call the public school system? We have a fundamental right to education but not health? I hope the US gets its act together because health care really is a deal breaker for many, many Americans.

Thanks for visiting gentle reader. Wow that was a bit of a surprise, Bruce’s health care rant! Well it seems many people have strong feelings on both sides of that issue. Let’s hope everyone works together for what is best for all. And feel free to express your opinions via the comments queue. Hasta Luego!