Craters in the Garden and Card Eating ATM's

We finally arrived on Cozumel on Friday to start the nitty-gritty work on our pool. We had hoped to start a week earlier but our builders were not going to be available and a second date was stymied by the airline deciding at the last minute to cancel the flight.

Once we dropped off the bags we went out to gawp in admiration at the extra deep crater in our back garden. I say extra deep because we have ventured further into the karst (limestone and dead coral) than most do.

Mi esposo, the diver, wanted a place to check his dive gear so we are intending to go for two meters (6’ 6”) at the deep end to accomplish this. Going deeper than around 4 feet is no easy task on Cozumel as the island’s karst core is literally rock hard. It took a three weeks of digging and drilling to clear the depth we wanted. While we were happily swanning around in Virginia our neighbours were probably getting pretty desperate but thankfully they all still seemed pleased to see us return and there were no complaints to our builders.


We hadn’t helped matters much ourselves by choosing a site which was originally a circular ten foot by one foot deep concrete patio with a whacking great 45 foot royal palm in the middle! The grand old palm had long past bitten the dust, mid hurricanes Emily and Wilma but its roots were pervasive. (Actually biting the dust is is putting it mildly – but that’s a whole other story yet to be told).

Saturday was a half day for the workers so for the first few days we hung out as tourists generally enjoying the house, the weather and the food.


On Sunday my bank card was swallowed up by the ATM outside one of the main supermarkets on the island. This was a serious dent to my financial planning but I had backups in place and my management company has a chunk of change I wired while the pesos was high so all is still far from lost . It will just require a bit more juggling now.

Life never flows smoothly on Cozumel but backups and perserverence usually help you to endure the bumps.