Tuesday - Chichen Itza -
Gray Line Tour Bus
Tuesday morning, 6am I get the wake-up call I set. So far so good, we have to be in the lobby ready to go at 7am. While many places push the "deluxe tour" for $75 US, I found that Gray Line had the exact same tour (complete with free buffet for lunch) for only $45 ... and with the AAA discount, that was only $40.50. So I had gotten everything set on the internet including receipts.
By 6:30 I was ready to go down for breakfast, but Mom called and worried we wouldn't have enough time to eat. She thought we should just skip breakfast. True enough, service around Cancun is 'leisurely'. So I hung out in the room and took photos of the REALLY cool and large magnificent frigatebirds that were flying around the lagoon in groups of 4 or 5. They were spectacular.
Also, there was a message on our phone system from the Timeshare people, complaining that we'd "missed" our 4:30pm appointment - this even though we TOLD THEM twice to their face that we were going to eat!! They said we really had to be at the one today between 8-10am. Of course our bus leaves at 7am. So I also spent this time writing them a note explaining we TOLD them we were going to eat on Mon ... that we were going to be on a bus today and that we NEEDED our return shuttle time left for us at the front desk. That we expected to find that information waiting for us when we returned from the bus trip at 7pm.
Finally at 6:50 I got Jenn up and we went down to the lobby. I left the note for Lomis Travel with the front desk. Mom wasn't there, so I called up to find her. She came down in a few minutes, and we waited there. Right at 7:05 the Gray Line bus showed up. The literature explained that this bus was just a 'collecting' bus that went from hotel to hotel, gathering all Gray Line tour people. We all then would go to their central terminal to sort out which bus to actually take to our destinations.
The guide got out and we gave our names. He said we weren't on his list, that we must be with another tour line and scolded us not to just randomly get on busses. I had to produce my receipts and prove to him that we WERE on a Gray Line tour to Chichen Itza, that we'd paid and that this was the sole reason we'd come down to Cancun, really. If we missed this one tour day, we wouldn't have another chance. We were going home tomorrow. Finally after some arguing and him calling back to his home base he let us get on.
We went from hotel to hotel gathering people, and it was sort of amusing because it appears many people had signed up on the spur of the moment without really knowing what they were doing. A lot of people tried to "choose the best seats" even though this was just a shuttle bus to the terminal, and others were asking "where are we going again? What are we going to see?" Eventually we got to the terminal at 8:15, with the actual tour busses leaving at 8:30.
We went through the giant market that surrounded the actual Gray Line desk (suspicious!) and found a HUGE line for those who had not pre-paid. Luckily we had and got into the shorter line, but even so, the guy looked at our receipts and claimed he had no record of us. Now, not only had I prepaid and gotten my receipts right from Gray Line.com, but I'd even written them explicitly asking for details on our tour and gotten a response and confirmation from the Gray Line Cancun office. So I was pretty worried that they had somehow now lost our details and we wouldn't get to go to Chichen Itza. Finally they hand-wrote a receipt for us. Poor mom wanted to shop in the market but it was now only 5 minutes before the bus would leave, so we booked out quickly to find our bus - CC2. I was worried we had in fact missed it already but we tracked it down and got on. Finally I could relax!! We were on the tour bus, we had our receipt, and we were Going to See Chichen Itza. Hurrah!!
The bus was quite comfy, with reclining seats, air conditioning, shades for the windows and a bathroom in back.
Driving to Chichen Itza
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