Past TRs
In and Around Tokyo in January
Trip to Sri Lanka (and Singapore & Hong Kong)
Nine Months Ago: Dubai, Samui & Tokyo with AS/EK/PG/XJ/SQ

For our family's summer vacation this year, we decided to head back to Mexico again. Even though we enjoyed our trip last year to some various cities and towns of the state of Guanajuato, one thing that was missing was some beach time. We initially toyed with the idea of going to Oaxaca (Puerto Escondido in particular), but the travel wasn't as straightforward as we would've liked. Upon doing more research, we decided on going to Isla Mujeres for the first part of our trip for some beach time without going to a place dominated by large resorts, followed by Mexico City for some city time.

In booking the trip, the fares for a PDX-CUN-MEX-PDX routing were quite high as we had booked the trip late. In comparison, F only cost a little bit more than an expensive fare in Y on AA, so we ended up with the following which was all in F besides the short hop from CUN-MEX.

DL 1824 PDX-SLC
DL 933 SLC-CUN
AM 592 CUN-MEX
AM 646 MEX-LAX
DL 1454 LAX-PDX

Portland - Salt Lake City - Cancún
The first leg of our trip was the six in the morning flight out to Salt Lake City, which has been my most travelled flight of the year, mainly due to business travel. While it wasn't fun to wake up around three-forty in the morning, at least we were heading out on vacation. The airport experience along with the flight were completely uneventful, except for the fact that we were denied entry to the Delta SkyClub at PDX since we were merely in F and not DeltaOne. I had known that to be the case but a friend of mine had tried to persuade me that we should have access. Oh well, at least I got to prove him wrong.


Quiet PDX gate area early on a Saturday


DL Boeing 737-900ER N809DN on arrival in Salt Lake City

Even though SLC is in dire need of updating (and yes, I know they are indeed updating the airport), its compactness allows for connecting times of less than hour. In this case, it allowed us time to use the restroom, walk over to the D concourse, ponder what the Jazz Room is, fiddle around on our phones for a bit and then board our flight to Cancún.


Disembarked at Concourse C


And walked over to Concourse D


DL Airbus A321-200 N333DX, operating as DL 933 to CUN. Looking at DL's schedules, it seems they upgauge to a A321 on weekends

The only thing of note was that DL was trialing facial recognition as a way to board. I opted out and boarded using my phone, as per usual.


Neighbouring plane heading out to ATL

I watched one film on the four and half hour flight, fell asleep during the second film and basically relaxed as I started to enjoy my first vacation of the year.


First class cabin


Bloody Mary


I preordered the healthier option of steel cut oatmeal with quinoa and fruit since I knew I would be indulging while on vacation. I had this nine days prior and it was good, so I was happy to have it again.


Tang Wei in Bi Gan's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". The film is supposed to be excellent but in my tired state, I found it hard to follow the story and ended up falling asleep since I had been up since three forty-five.

We arrived into Terminal Three at Cancún International Airport. The lines at immigration weren't bad at all, only involving about a ten minute wait. By the time we got to baggae claim, our bags were all there but unfortunately, we got the dreaded red light and customs went through all of our stuff. After that, it was through the gauntlet of touts to our prebooked transfer service to the ferry pier at Puerto Juárez. I will confess that due to this being our first time in Cancún, we did stop and talk to one of the touts for a bit as it was a bit difficult to tell who "official" or not. Thankfully all this consisted of was being handed a map of Isla Mujeres along with some spiels about interesting places to see on the island. Once we got out of the terminal, we were able to find our van, which was booked through USA Transfers for a cost of US$116 roundtrip. This amount also included the ferry tickets between Puerto Juárez and Isla Mujeres.

The ride itself was about a half hour and we had a friendly driver who told us a little bit about the area. Once there, the driver headed into the ticketing office and handed us our roundtrip tickets. We had just missed a ferry so we had a half hour wait at the open air terminal.