I planned this trip with Sherri because we wanted to do nothing after the past year of covid-19. I was hoping that the Covid-19 Pandemic would have mostly subsided by now, so that the covid restrictions would be much loser. Only because I find wearing a mask in very humid places makes me sweat so much around the face, so sometimes doesn’t always feel comfortable. 🙂 Anyways, we planned this one week trip, and wanted to just enjoy all the food and luxuries of no cooking or worrying about doing chores.
We did another costco travel package for Mexico. When I don’t want to do any work and just want to have everything done for me, and knowing full well that the places they chose are actually good, I end up choosing costco. For this one, we went to the occidental resort in rivera nayarit which I found out is not actually in puerto vallarta but in the neighboring city. I ended up upgrading us to the royal level, because it wasn’t that much more to have several more features (like wifi, and a special concerige for royal members with 24 hour room service, and access to more private areas of the resort).
I was impressed with how good the service is for royal members. There was never any line, and they responded really quickly to us. The one thing that I wish I had brought was more loose change to tip people. I didn’t really have 1’s or small pesos.
I really enjoyed how they tried to make everyone feel covid safe. So I think they had capacity of their restaurants at around 50% or less. I think the royal dinner area had 15 tables, but it looked like they only had 5 tables available to make reservations for each hour.
The weather out at the resort was a little bit on the hot side, but I loved it. It was around 70-90 degrees throughout the day with a 70-90% humidity. This made me feel really sweaty, and not want to take walks along the beach during the middle of the day. Sherri and I went for long walks on the beach early in the morning after breakfast, and after dinner. The walks were really great, because we were able to just talk about what we want for the future for our family, and just talk about all the different things on our mind.
The Royal Level Pool area was great, it was only a 4 foot deep pool all around, and no one was at the pool until 11:30am, and even then, at most there were 4-6 people in the pool. After breakfast, Sherri and I would lounge around here, and I would swim and play around in the water for a couple hours. We saw the same 3-4 families there everyday.
The funny story sherri told me is how there was a mexican family sitting next to us. And I guess in mexican culture, they give each other some funny nicknames based on their looks, so the wife might say to the husband something like “hey fatso, can you get me a drink?”
With the weather being so hot, it was nice to jump into the water once every 30 minutes.
When the weather was the hottest, sherri and I made our way down to the beachside cabana’s, we just laid around there sleeping and I would tell all the people on the beach trying to sell me stuff that I didn’t want their wares.
Our schedule for the week was very relaxing, we mostly stayed at the resort, except for tuesday night we went to Savia “rhythm of the nights”, and on thursday we had a “bus tour of the old city”. The rest of the days (mon, wed, and friday), we would eat at the hotel restaurants, and hangout near the pool/cabana, work out in the gym, and then relax in our room watching stuff on the roku.
The gym was pretty big, it was divided into 2 areas with weight machines, 1 area with threadmills/bicycles, and 1 area with freeweights and mats for ground work. I feel like with Sherri and I trying to eat more healthy and taking care of our body. This was one of the first times we actually worked out a lot at a resort while on vacation.
I was told that this show was similar to circus soleil. It involves a 30 minutes sunset boat ride to a coast off of puerto vallarta , and there is a nice adventure designed area. The boat ride was pretty fun, the workers on the boat did some dancing and tried to get the fun atmosphere going.
On tuesday night, the were light showers at the area the “Savia: Rhythm of the night” was performin at.,so they gave us one coat, and one umbrella. The one nice thing about the high humidity, you could see rain coming down 50 feet above us, but it was evaporating into the air before it reached us. The seats were not that comfortable, but the show was really fun. Sherri and I enjoyed the fire jugglers, and the asian contortionists. The food for dinner was pretty good too, I actually really like beets and pineapple salad. Overall, I would say it is a really fun night. Only thing I was not use to is the late dinner, because the boat leaves at 7:00pm, we arrived at the area at around 7:45pm, but there were 4 boats going there, so the show didn’t start until 8:30. So dinner did not start until around 10:15pm.
Then going back to the hotel and getting an after meal snack was so nice! Sometimes I wish I could live like this everyday.
