Cancún Part 1

The newest Staley family endeavor took ten of us on an adventure to Mexico. In search of an affordable family vacation, my mom and aunt scoured the internet and found an amazing deal on an all inclusive resort stay in Dreams Riviera Resort. My mother, father, aunt, uncle, sister (Emily), brother (Jack), cousins (Matt & Ellie), cousin’s girlfriend, and I travelled south and spent the week before Christmas on the beaches of Cancún. Like always, chaos and consequential laughter consumed the majority of our trip. Bear with me as I take two blog posts to explain some of the many highlights.

Day 1. Travel. It would not be a vacation planned by my parents if we didn’t leave in the ungodly early morning hours. At 2 a.m., we packed up the car and headed toward the airport. Just so you know, this gave us literally four and a half hours to navigate through the Pittsburgh airport to our flight.  Boarding and take off went smoothly. Jack fell asleep, Emily starting reading one of her seven books, Mom took pictures, and my aunt held on for dear life. Little did she know that our small plane would hit the worst turbulence I have ever encountered. I’m talking plane shuddering, flickering lights kind of turbulence. It woke me up from my much needed nap (which is a difficult feat to accomplish considering my sleeping abilities). Regardless, we landed safely and our vacation began.

For lodging, we divided into pairs and moved into rooms. We encompassed five rooms altogether. Interestingly enough, we all thought it would be a great idea to allow my fourteen year old brother and fifteen year old cousin to share their own room which was adjoined to mine and Emily’s. Jack and Ellie (fondly nicknamed “Jellie”) took a particular liking to the room service. They made routine calls to the front desk and likely consumed more than the rest of us combined. Jellie’s relationship with room service proved to be resourceful when we were put in a tight situation later that week.

Easily entertained as we may be, we Staley kids often play a game similar to the “dare” part of truth or dare. It’s called “The Odds Game“. It goes like this. One person addresses another with “What are the odds of you doing (insert dare here) …?” Based on the absurdity of the task, the other person will pick a range, “One out of ten,” for example. A third person will count down from three. On one, the “darer” and “daree” will each say a number within that range. If they both say the same number, the “daree” must complete the task, or get willingly slapped by all involved parties. Jack is very often victim to this game. A couple nights into our trip, we were walking back to our rooms at the end of the night as we walked past the hot tub. My older sister dared Jack to jump into it, fully clothed, and sure enough, they guessed the same number. So he took of his shoes and socks, and cannonballed into the empty hot tub.

After floating around in there for a couple minutes, he got out, and walked back to the room sopping wet. About ten minutes later, after changing into dry clothes, we heard a quiet apprehensive voice from Jellie’s room say “uhh, guys?” Little did he know, in the pocket of his pants was his new iPhone. In a mad panic, he called room service requested, “raw rice asap”, which did in fact come. We did all we could to restore Jack’s phone to working conditions; nonetheless, it was too little too late for Jack’s already dead phone.