Kukowski Family Vacation: Akumal Mexico

Brandon’s parents are amazingly generous. They take the whole family on a vacation every year. It is really great because we are all spread out and don’t see each other that often. It is nice to be able to spend quality time together.  Charlie really loved all of the attention he received from his Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

This year it worked really well for us because we needed to renew our visas. We are in Guatemala on a 90-day tourist visa. It is easy to renew. You just need to leave the country every 90 days. We were 41 days over on our visa renewal. Because of this we had to pay a fine at the airport. The fine was the equivalent of $55.00 per person.  Charlie received his first passport stamp…the first of many for him we hope!

The beach was great and so was the company. We were lucky in that my dad, Grandma, and other family were on vacation about an hour away so they came for a day to meet Charlie. We had a great time reconnecting.

It also so happened that our friends Ryan and Megan from Minnesota and Nick and Delia from Mexico were also on vacation and were staying about a 2 minute walk down the beach. We met Nick and Delia’s new daughter Alex and also got to see how big Megan and Ryan’s daughter had gotten since August.

Our trip home was very long. Brandon wanted to take the direct flight from Guatemala City to Cancun but that meant being away longer and I didn’t really want to leave the dogs that long. So instead we had a layover in Mexico City. This was fine on the way there. It was really cool to see Mexico City from the air.  It is massive!! But our flight out of Cancun was delayed 2 hours making us miss our connecting flight out of Mexico City.

We ended up having a 5-hour layover in Mexico City. We were lucky in that the airline did upgrade us to first class (I think having a baby helped this to happen) and so we were able to hang in the first class lounge. We wanted to make the 3-hour trip home on Saturday but we didn’t end up getting to Guatemala City until midnight.  We stayed in the city and headed home the next morning. To go 400 miles from Guatemala City to Cancun took us FOREVER! I will listen to Brandon next time!

We arrived home only to say goodbye to our friends Yash and Zoe.  We only met them 5 weeks ago but we became very close spending much time with them. We had pizza night, patio happy hours, Rummikub, brunch club, and morning coffee after Yash’s swims. Jackson and Kirby really took a liking to Yash and Zoe as well. Zoe was woken up on more than one occasion to find Kirby licking her feet or Jackson eating out of their compost in their kitchen. We hope London treats you well and look forward to seeing you both again!!

We are settling back in to life on the lake. Our conversations now are “will we stay longer or will we return to Minnesota”.  Who really knows what will happen at this point…this is very exciting and anxiety provoking as well.  The beautiful thing is that we don’t really have to make any decisions just yet and we are enjoying our simple life and watching Charlie grow!

XOXO,

Katie, Brandon, and Charlie