Big Summer ☀️ in Mérida 🇲🇽
Musings on the beginning of a big summer trip as a family in the hothothot 🔥 Yucatán
It’s 2023, our first academic summer, where we get to take off for three months - no teaching obligations, remote-work enabled. Hoping this is a template we can repeat in future years - traveling in semi-comfortable settings for long periods. It’s important to us to embrace discomfort and expose ourselves and our daughter, Simone, to geographic/cultural diversity, and this is our first leap in that direction.
We love traveling - overseas, in our hometown, in surrounding areas. Being on the go feels right to us. Hoping that we can share our experiences, and relay best practices, so you are empowered to do the same :)
So this trip - from the start of June through mid-July - should be a wonderful time!! We’re going to work remotely during the week at Conexion601, get support from a local nanny for Mon-Fri care (which we arranged through Babysits), and enjoy the nights/weekends as much as possible.
Notes on this Substack
We think that life is richest and fullest when families are together, traveling, experiencing the world’s vast beauty. We hike in the backcountry together, explore everywhere from big cities to small towns, and all the time gather our thoughts to reflect on how to optimize our experiences for future iterations.
We will release multiple posts for a specific trip in real time (while we’re on the trip), and drop our next series only when we have another family trip. The frequency should be one trip - where we engage traveling best practices for families with kids - every couple of months. Subscribers will have access to additional posts related to trips we took in the past, or ideas we have for future trips. Subscribers will also have access to a vibrant community of followers that works together here in Substack and on Discord to talk through all the right ways to parent and ensure that your family is living an enriched life.
Our ultimate goal is to enable and promote a life of travel. Knowledge of constraints and good planning are requisite for awesome adventures. The knowledge that we build as a community will promote and sustain that version of the good life.
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“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” John Muir2
That said, let’s jump in :) 💦
🤔Why Mérida?
Years ago, on a trip to the Yucatán in which we focused on Cancun (the city) and Tulum, we also built in a 5-hour bus ride to the lovely coastal-ish city of Mérida. We remembered it being hustle-and-bustle but full of life. We stayed in the Zócalo, and there was a massive concert that rattled our windows late into sleep-time (made us (Nick) super mad in the moment, but hilarious looking back). We remembered 1) never stay right in the zocalo (push back a few blocks) and 2) what a cute city.
A few differences this time upon immediate observation. First, COVID likely had a big impact on liveliness, tourism, and small businesses. While there are still more shops and eateries than you can shake a stick at, there are lots of boarded up windows. Also - we’re here in June, which we’ve been told is the hottest month of the year. It’s truly hot. Like Houston-meets-Havana-hot. Like don’t-go-out-during-siesta hours-hot.
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The biggest difference is having an awesome, irreplaceable little addition to the family. Traveling with S, who is now 2.5 big-girl-years old, is a lot harder than traveling alone. When Kathleen and I travel alone, we power through a lot of the hard stuff (hunger, thirst, finding bathrooms, being hot) without too much problem. Doing that with a kid is cruel. So we take many more breaks, move slowly, and have to tamper heated emotions regularly. She’s also 95% potty trained, which means there are accidents when she’s stressed, and that makes her sad, and all that is a bummer. (Had a bad #1 at a super cute coffee shop called Sempere… the folks working there were so sweet, but we were pretty embarrassed and ducked out quickly after cleanup.)
So taken together this is a different adventure than our last here in the far East stretches of the Yucatán. But onward :)
✈️Transitioning
Traveling with a toddler is not the simplest, but there are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself. We are always looking for opportunities for S to run free - we might run through the airport as if we’re late for our flight just to burn some energy or play a game of chase in an open area while we wait for our plane to board. S also likes to go up and down the escalators a million times. Once on the plane, we pull out a “mystery” bag of small toys and slowly reveal them over the course of the trip. This was great when she was little, but now that she’s screen-obsessed like the rest of us, we let her binge watch downloaded episodes of Bluey and Trash Truck. Just remind yourself that traveling sucks for everyone and try be sympathetic to your little one and gracious to yourself.
Same goes for jet lag. Remember that you whiny toddler is also sleepy and stressed with the cognitive load of all things new - new sights, words, smells, people, modes of transit. (The first time we traveled to a city that required frequent use of Ubers, S seemed perplexed by the situation, pointed to the driver each time and asked “Who’s that? What’s his name?”) We try not to be rigid about sleep schedules, instead taking naps and letting the sunlight help us adjust as needed.
Finally, try to incorporate the familiar to ease the transition. We scoped out some playgrounds for S to play at during our most recent trip to Portugal. While enjoying a drink at the co-located cafe, we met a cool American couple who had just moved to Lisbon and they invited us to a nice dinner at their home. S got to play with their little one while we enjoyed a really special evening and home-cooked meal.
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🗼(Some) Sites
It’s honestly been tough finding kid-friendly outdoor activities, largely due to the confluence of crushing heat and mini-sidewalks. Just walking around is a bit of a pain, even in the nicer parts of town (Santa Lucia Park, main square). There’s alota debris - probably due to a lack of public trash containers/trashes. Folks pile trash on the street in big heaps, and the wind kicks it around before pickup happens. Pretty problematic for the city. S kept remarking that “someone made a mess” in reference to plastic bags, bottles, etc. strewn about. Thus, finding kid friendly spaces has been hard from the start. But we’re cracking into the shell bit by bit. For example…
The Parque Zoológico del Centenario is kind of amazing. It’s free (though you pay for random activities throughout - but its all cheap). Pretty clean and just a massive space. There are ~400 meters of walkway with vendors peddling food and (below pictured) activities - even before you get to the zoo entrance. There’s lots of shade from big beautiful trees, a steady-amazing breeze, and nice folks milling about. There are emus and giraffes and all kinds of fun park areas full of kids enjoying themselves. This is a big, open space that’s perfect for a few hours at a time. The area (Cenentario) also has a bunch of grocery stores (eg Super Aki) - which was a welcome addition since our AirBNB’s Santiago neighborhood doesn’t have any in walking distance.
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There are a few big parks on the West side of town. They’re fun and lively and full of families having a nice time. At Jardin Bepensa, We passed through a huge dance-workout session with all kinds of folks getting down. S had to stop and observe and then participate - she shook it hard for about five minutes before scrambling back to the playgrounds. Still on our “wanna go” list in the area are Poniente Ecological Park, and Parque Zoológico Animaya, both of which look big and fun.
And altogether, if you can Uber somewhere and avoid the heat and traffic, you’ll do fine. There are plenty of wide-open spaces for running and relaxing, from the big (Plaza Central), to the small (Parque de La Mejorada - where there was also a fun card-trading event going down). There’s natural beauty exploding from the seams here, from stopping and standing under massive ceiba trees (also an awesome local beer company), to picking capulín berries - that taste like cotton candy grapes - from the source.
OMG and AUGH CENOTES. What a dream.
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We hit a few closer to Cancun and Valladolid when we were here before, and so far we only got to see one on this side of the state. But it was so awesome. We meant to see X-Batun, but couldn’t get a ride over there (neither bus or taxi/Uber) from Manú or Chocholá. (We at first took a bus from ADO Centro Histórico TAME to Chocholá like Rome2Rio recommended, but no dice getting to X-Batun from there). Instead, we stayed in Chocholà and visited their marvelous Cenote San Ignacio. It was expensive ($350 Mx pesos/person) but that got you a really cool experience (see pics above), access to a pretty “rio artificial”, and all day use of their restaurant and bar area.3 Loved our time there.
🤗 Exciting Month Ahead
Cant wait to followup with the next post! We’ll keep digging into the city, and we plan to take trips to Valladolid, Uxmal, Celestun, Progreso, tons of cenotes, and share all the fun details. Please leave a note if you have insights or questions!
$200 US for 24/7 access - not bad!
They’re building a new lounge and bar onsite that isn’t finished yet but should be mid-2023.
Sounds like it's gonna be an amazing summer! That Cenote is BONKERS!
y'all are awesome! Looking forward to reading about your travels 🔥