Good morning!

Welcome to your Great Auntie Anne, showing up at your holiday dinner with SLIDES! From HER VACATION. Your excitement and enthusiasm are UNCONTAINABLE.

While in Mexico, we went to Coba Ruins. What the hell are those? I’ve linked it back there. YOU’RE WELCOME. To get to Coba from Playa del Carmen, we took the ADO bus for almost two hours. It was pretty nice. You will not believe how much you will revere sitting in a mobile air conditioned box until you’ve felt the heat and humidity of this place.

Bus dropped us off in town. That sidewalk is drunk and trying to make it home.

Coba is big, so we went Austin Powers village bike joke style, in that everybody got a ride.

I figured we’d spend the day looking at variants on Pile Of Rocks, since ruins are old, and what survives millennia better than a pile-type structure? Plus, I’d read Coba isn’t yet entirely excavated. But once there, it was pretty interesting, with a variety of structures. Plus, I felt hella Indiana Jones biking through the jungle, amongst some long abandoned city (but also filled with tourists. Many of whom paid not just for a bike, but for tricycles with drivers. We were veritably surrounded by dolled up folks riding on the  back seat  of a tricycle, instagramming and go-proing their asses off).

(soooooo many instagrammers.  Most of whom appeared to be solo female 20-something travelers wearing flowy scarves and full makeup. It made me realize there is a generation of super kick ass women coming up different than how I was raised, which was mostly my mom panic-grabbing my arm and warning me to never, ever travel alone as a woman. Light it, next gen!)

You can still climb a Mayan pyramid here, so we did.

My husband took a lot of verrry unflattering photos of me butt scooting back down, in a line of butt scooters. God willing, they will never see the light of day. The photos, not the butt scooters. It was hot as hell. We all saw a lot of light.

Coming back, we passed the lake. Tourists (including my husband, not pictured) were climbing out on this rickety ass dock.

Some, unknowing there were crocodiles RIGHT THERE in the water.

Not my husband though. He saw the croc first and was like, “hold my beer, I gotta go out on that dock and get a better look.”

Waiting for the bus, there were several stray dogs and empty shops.

Bus whisked us home by six.

This was the day it completely hit me I was a middle-aged mother of teenagers. I kept up fine, and wasn’t tired or anything. But every new memory brought up old ones of when I was a teen and my parents took us out. Back In Mah Day, a big time family vacation was spending a few days in Okoboji, Iowa. Aside from water, there seemed very few connections that might dredge old memories up. Still, every reflective surface, I saw my mother’s body, her profile. My fun was not the wild exuberance of taking a trip, but the guarded and guard-dog style pleasure of seeing the kids happy and safe while doing something they’d never done before. During one of our connecting flights, an attendant going through our passports called me by my oldest daughter’s name. Instead of being flattered, I had this core deep sense of No, I’m the Mom. I sure as hell don’t feel comfortable becoming my mother, and it’s scary to feel time pushing me relentlessly into old age. Between my internalized ageism and lack of revered old lady role models, I feel a bit at a loss. Even so, it was shocking to feel so strongly that I’m not the kid anymore, and I don’t want to be.

Cozumel in the distance.