Cancun 1981 (#114; Topic N)

Today's Washington Post has a front-page photo of Mexico's Vincente Fox, USA's George Bush, and Canada's Stephen Harper in Chichen Itza, on a break from their two-day summit in Cancun. This brings back a fond memory more than 25 years ago. In 1980, during my first year as a professor at the U of Texas in Dallas, I thought traveling around Texas during the Christmas holidays with our children, both away at college, would be fun. When telephoning our daughter, a freshman at Yale, to break the news, she mentioned that some of her classmates were planning to visit Cancun. Cancun? Where is it? Never heard of it. So, we visited it the following Christmas. While flying down, we agreed that each could only buy one thing. While there, I was struck by Cancun's natural and unspoiled beauty (the location, along with one on Mexico's west coast, were computer-selected for their pristine status; in the early 1980s, they were just being developed as tourist destinations). So, while our son, daughter, and my wife each bought a T-shirt as souvenir, I used my allotment to buy a condo. Named Pyramides del Rey, to be managed by Sheraton, it was still under construction. So, in subsequent years, our family vacationed there, visiting nearby sights such as Chichen Itza, and witnessing its rapid development to become a premier vacation spot in the process. In the mid-1990s, with our children graduating first from college and then from graduate schools, with my becoming ill from food poisoning in a restaurant highly recommended in a Cancun guidebook, and with the town losing its rural charm through rapid commercialization, we sold the condo.
Posted at 11:33 pm, Friday, March 31, 2006