Puerta Vallarta!

We spend 10 days together in Puerta Vallarta this July as a combination of Mother's Day, Father's Day, our 11th Anniversary and both our birthday budgets...plus some flight kickbacks from our credit card....and it was pure heaven!

This is us waiting for our room to be ready. We literally walked back out the lobby doors and 50 ft onto the beach. That is our hotel behind us...

then I flipped the camera around (didn't budge from my spot on the rocks) and took this!

Our room was spectacular! We had a full apartment with a kitchen, sitting room and separate bedroom and bathroom. It was very spacious and looked straight out over the ocean.

AND...yes, there's more...AND, when you walk out the glass doors from either our room or the sitting area you come onto our private patio and down 2 steps to our PRIVATE POOL! Yeah baby!

This s the ocean view from our private pool deck!

Seriously spoiled.

We walked just down the beach to have dinner at this nice place on the beach and arrived just as a terrific lighting storm rolled in over the ocean. The warm rain poured down off the thatch roof while the live band played and we watched the lightning show over the ocean...super romantic one of a kind dining expereince!

We were a short walk from the main boardwalk in downtown PV, the Malecon. So each day we'd venture out to explore a little bit. The first day we went straight along the beach to get there since what we were exploring WAS the Malecon- having never been there.

Along our way we came across this poor fellow!

Also, several other monuments and statures that taking selfies in front of seemed...well, too touristy for me!

But we still had to do the most well known of them- just because!

My favorite thing to do in town was wander and look for local markets, like the one in the background here!

Everyone is selling Mexican Vanilla, but when we found the really good stuff I bought 4 or 5 huge bottles of it!

While wandering the streets we got sucked into a timeshare presentation to get a couple of excursions for next to nothing- and I have to say they were worth it!

We did an ATV tour in the jungle/zip lines at the Predator park...there's the predator now!

The jungle and scenery were fantastic!

I also go to drive...which was pretty fun!- minus the doing so in a swim suit..but it was worth it when it came time to dip in the freezing water at the bottom of the zip lines!

The other excursion was a boat ride to a remote town where we saw a super cool live show with dancing and storytelling and cool acrobatics and such followed by a candle-lit dinner.

While we were waiting for the boat... I made a friend!

I was a little apprehensive about the "short" boat ride- and it was short, and I still got sick...

But I had dinner to look forward to, right?

Plus we passed this super cool pirate ship that looked like it was something right out of Peter Pan!

The remote place they took us was amazing! They had no electric lighting asside from the show lights and some underwater spotlights that lit up the ocean as we pulled in.

 The performers all greeted us on the pathways leading from the dock to the amphitheater.

Along with the great scenery!

Here we are in our seats, ready for the show to start!

Once it got dark we realized there were TONS of fireflies in the bushes around us... so that was fun!

After the show we snuck up on stage while everyone was going to find dinner and took a picture with the cool pyramid that was the centerpiece and backdrop for the show- since it was all lit up and stuff now!

The pathways were lined with tiki torches to light the way and the performers who did more performing all night.

They somehow managed to seperate all the people from the amphitheater into more intimate groupings of 20-30 and each group sat in a secluded palapa (like toes in the sand, candles on the table) with it's own dinner buffet and designated servers. The dinner was SUPER yummy and we had an unimpeded view of the ocean and the shoreline on the other side of the bay.

....

Our other time, asside for the aforementioned timeshare presentation and two excursions, was spent either relaxing on the beach, in our room, in our pool or exploring the town.

One day while wandering we even found the Mexican 5 buck pizza equivalent!

Somehow we also had a knack for finding ice cream :)

This particular heladeria also had a very chatty little bird!

Another fun sign we came across:

It's a little long, and kind of travel blogg-sih (intended for the kids!) but here is a video compilation of what I did take footage of. Enjoy!

It was so fun to be there when we were because we were quite literally one of less than a dozen white couples/people we encountered there. We went during the Mexican travel season so the streets, beaches and excursions were all full of Mexican tourists! We got to speak SO MUCH Spanish! I loved it! 

We slept in, wandered, ate where and when we wanted, and found a good mix of authentic, gourmet and fun foods to enjoy. I LOVED having our own pool just 2 steps away, and it was the perfect temperature, too. Cool enough to be refreshing but warm enough it was not difficult to just jump right in. The ocean was basically ours on the private beach outside our hotel and town was full of all sorts of adventures! I was a fantastic mix of culture, relaxation, pampering, fun and exploration. I can't say enough how great it was!

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