Please visit my Hurricane Dean Cancun Blog for the latest info and thoughts.

One thing is 99% sure though and that is this storm will become Hurricane Dean sooner or later and possibly go as high as a Category 3. Several of the forecasted models put the Yucatan Peninsula in it’s path at the moment, but we are going to have to wait several more days before it’s time for panic stations.

Check out our Live Cancun Webcam and the dicussion on our Cancun Forum

This is the first one Jannet’s made which features our Isla Mujeres booze cruise.

The cruise we do is a private hire of a catamaran and we sail over to Isla Mujeres. It’s open bar all day, lunch included and we normally do a golf cart convoy of the island, I think the most carts we ever had at once was 9. We’ve held about 15 of these cruises so far this year and averaged around 25 people each trip, so almost 400 people have come along.

We have a ton of these leaf cutter ants that can literally strip a 6 foot bush in a day. We’ve got through about a kilo of ant powder, had the garden sprayed with insecticide and still it has no affect.

They really are fascinating to watch though, they march in lines following a pheromone scent that they lay down, then carry pieces of leaf that are about three times their size back to their nest. They don’t actually eat the leaves, they use them to create an environment in their nest where a fungus can thrive and then they eat the fungus. They are pretty smart too, they wont eat a plant until it dies, they leave just enough of it left so that it can regrow and then they go elsewhere for a while only to return a few weeks later.

Smart and fascinating as they are though, I still want to kill them.

The current site I cringe at every time I see it, it looks so amateurish and unprofessional that I hate to add new pages as I have to use the same crappy design. I suppose it was the first ever website I made though, it’s done well in the search engines and makes sales - so as far as it goes it’s been successful.

The new site is going to be something else though, I’ve already made a ton of new pages and with the system I’m going to use it will mean it’s very easy to add many more pages.

I’m going to be using a lot of video too, which I think will be a first for a Cancun site and is so much more 2007. Hopefully, the slicker more professional look, the crisper coding and the new content pages will be a lot more appealing to both surfers, and just as importantly the search engines.

I’d love to be able to say I designed and built it all by myself. However my design and coding skills, although improving, don’t go as far as what we will soon have at cancuncare. My good friend Kim (Rivergirl) at Magnolia Web Design is the one to thank for that. Kim came up with perfect code, right on the brief and made me some great easy to work with templates. Thanks Kim!

Now all I have to do is fill them with juicy content. You can see a screenshot of one of the new pages above left, but you’ll have to wait a little more yet before the new site launches.

The main reason we moved was because it was too noisy at the old place, with teenage kids on skateboards every night, and the main road that was a few feet from our living room window often used as a racetrack. Of course, here, functioning silencers on cars are an optional extra.

We now no longer have to put up with the dogs too. There were about 15 of them (from just 20 houses) and almost all were noisy yappy things. Some of their owners clearly coudlnt care less for them, leaving them on hot 6 foot square patios for 24 hrs a day and only letting them out to either bath them in the pool or let them do their business where one of the toddlers would fall in it.

The new place is a detached place rather than a house within a complex and is much quieter. It has an extra bedroom to use as an office, is much bigger overall and has been maintained much better than our old place. The only disadvantage is that we dont have access to a pool any more (I never went in it anyway), but we do have a fairly spacious garden by Cancun standards and our daughter has a nice big paddling pool so it’s no great loss, and the new quietness and privacy more than makes up for that.

These little beasties are not lice at all, rather they are the microscopic larvae of the thimble jellyfish. The larvae get between your skin and your bathing suit and cause large red welts to appear that itch like crazy. Given that it’s the areas that your swimsuit hides that are affected it’s not nice at all.

Last week we were doing one of our regular booze cruises to Isla Mujeres and we came across about twenty or so ribbons of the adult jellyfish, you can see one pictured above left. The ribbons were about 6-10 feet wide and stretched as far as the eye could see. 

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I thought I’d better get a couple of entries in before the end of the month as it’s been 3 months since I last updated. I’ve said it before and, no doubt I’ll let things go again, but I am going to try to post more often. The blog is still receiving around 60/100 visits a day so I ought at least write something for people to read.

I think part of the problem was I was writing too many long entries and messing around editing and uploading photos and videos. A “quick” 10 minute post often ended up taking half an hour or more, and became a bit of a chore.

I’ll try to post shorter more snappy articles and not insist on a photo with almost every post, as I used to. In fact, I’m going to set up half a dozen or so blog entries right now and then let the auto post feature publish them over the next week or so.

So, hang around and check back for hopefully a more frequently updated Cancun blog.

Here’s another little cute story that is the kind of thing that makes living here a pleasure. On Saturday, we had a drive through to the Hotel Zone, we haven’t been there in a while so it made a nice change. Anyhow, on the approach road the traffic was backed up a little and their were people in the street stopping the cars. Day to day life here and especially driving involves being approached for money at almost every intersection and traffic light. Usually, it is for charity donations, windscreen washers, people selling drinks and snacks, newspapers, telephone cards etc but this one was a little different.

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I finally found some time to write the trip report from our recent stay in Mexico City. Once I started typing I couldnt stop so sorry it’s so long. So here goes:

SATURDAY

We left the house around 7:45 for the short walk to the place where we bought our flight tickets ($250 pp) as that is where our included airport transfer was departing. Once at the airport the flight was delayed by about an hour but eventually we were on our way. It seemed strange to be heading in a different direction to our usual airport departures, we flew over Merida and out across the Gulf. Over the sea for about an hour before once again crossing a very different coastline on our approach to Mexico City for a total flight time of 2 hours.

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