Getting Lost in Mexico

If you ever want to truly test your new marriage and find out how much you really trust your partner go to a foreign country and get lost outside of the major city. It will immediately prove how you work together under stress. Fortunately, when this actually happened to us everyone remained surprisingly level headed and we made it home without being robbed!

Enjoying ourselves at Xel Ha.

What the heck were we doing wandering around the outside of Cancun, Mexico you might ask? Well through a series of unfortunate events that start with Aubrey leaving her phone on a bus and involve 2 taxi rides, 2 bus rides, and visits to 3 different offices in Cancun we ended up at a bus terminal near the Cancun airport, waaaaayyyy out of town. The taxi driver who brought us there wasn’t super friendly and didn’t want to stick around while we figured out how to get the phone back, so we thought we would just go catch a taxi from the Marriot next door. That was a HUUUUGE mistake.

Turns out the Marriot doesn’t want anything to do with anyone that is staying there and won’t even let you through the gate to use the phone. Dumbfounded we began to walk in the direction of Cancun which was a good 10 or 15 miles away.

Imagine walking along the interstate where there are no businesses, no nothing and it is getting dark. Are you getting nervous? Do you feel scared? Now imagine doing that in Mexico! We walked for probably a mile or more before we found a gas station. I talked to the attendants and explained as best I could in Spanish our situation. They directed us to cross the highway and get a bus going to “Centro”. I could just tell by their expressions that this lady thought we were probably going to die tonight.

Aub having entirely too many tequila shots the day before.

We crossed the highway and wandered to a bus stop that was outside of a college. Everyone at the bus stop just stared. Totally confused as to where these American had come from when there was nothing for miles. No buses came for a long, long time so we (Alex actually) decided it was best to just take the next bus going in the direction of Cancun. “We’ll be fine as long as it keeps going straight,” he says. Then what does the bus do? It exits off into a neighborhood. Now we are faced with staying on the bus and seeing where it takes us (possibly somewhere further away, or less populated) or get off and hope that a Domino’s is a good omen that this is a safe place.

We saw a taxi, but it was apparently broken and wasn’t any use in getting us home. As we stood on the street corner, being stared at by every single person in the whole area we were feeling really desperate. I know that I personally was about to crack. It was full dark now and we were lost and everyone around us knew it.

Just then a taxi, with passengers in tow, sped by. Aubrey started to chase after it hoping that she could somehow follow a moving vehicle and get in once the passengers had been dropped off. Clearly, that didn’t work out but another taxi came by without any passengers and we flagged him down like our lives depended on it. Probably before he even came to a full stop we were inside and begging him to take us home.

This may or may not have lead to the phone getting lost later...

Our driver just so happened to turn out to be the coolest taxi driver ever and had a screen showing music videos of 90s hit songs to entertain us on the ride back to the ferry dock.

Thankful to have made it home without losing our money or getting kidnapped we all relaxed into our seats on the ferry. Another guy riding the ferry was staring at us with a big grin on his face and I couldn’t figure out why. Until Aubrey realized he was at the college campus and had ridden the bus with us also. I’m sure this dude was trying to figure out how on earth we made it back here and what the heck we were doing but we didn’t stop to talk so he’ll always just have to wonder.

While I wouldn’t recommend ever getting yourself lost outside of the city in a foreign country it makes an interesting story. 



XOXO
Hayley

A Feminist Marriage: Modern Values Meeting Traditional

Most people that know me know that I identify as a raging feminist. My feelings about gender equality are some of the most defining parts of my personality. Right up there with my love for cats and my siblings. But sometimes being a feminist can be exhausting. This Onion article is probably the most accurate description I have ever seen of how it feels. When it came to marriage my feelings were definitely complicated. At least about the institution, not the the person I wanted to spend my life with.

Chelsea Wagner Photography

Like many other women I love weddings and everything about them. I've watched all of the TLC shows. I take David Tuttera's advice on everything to heart. (He thinks green is a horrible color FYI.) And I want Kleinfeld's to stock something other than just that one see through Pnina Tornai dresses. For myself personally though, I felt like marriage might betray my values that I can't shut up about. There are so many pitfalls from vowing to be an obedient wife to wearing white to display my purity to the giving up my name. Not to mention that the origins of marriage is basically just a business transaction between my husband and father. 

While I know a lot of those ideas aren't really what marriage is about today, it still felt like I was turning my back on things that I said were identifying qualities of myself. Ultimately, I fell in love with a wonderful human being and I did almost every one of these things that I felt a little icky about originally.

Chelsea Wagner Photography

I realized that I have control over what my wedding and marriage is all about and I can make it fit our values and ideas of a marriage. Also, there is something undeniably appealing about publicly committing yourself to a person that you love. You want the world to know that this is your lobster!

We chose to do our wedding our way. Sprinkles of tradition mixed in with lots of references to our cats and love of cats and how we were only getting married so our cat's parents would be together... (We're kinda weirdos.) We were married by one of our very close friends who made the ceremony extremely personal to us and I wrote the entire ceremony myself to ensure that all of the language described us as a team, not as a wife vowing to be loyal to her husbands wishes. We also skipped things that we didn't like or didn't think really fit us as a couple.

I also came to the decision to change my name to Grace relatively quickly because I was taking the name of people that I was proud to be related too and that I would be proud to have any potential future children named after too. It wasn't giving up who it was, it was growing to be apart even more family!

Chelsea Wagner Photography

Each step of our wedding was discussed and ultimately decided between my husband and I not because that's what we had to do, but because it was things that we wanted to do for our own personal reasons.

Ultimately, I realized that the beauty of feminism is that we can make whatever choice suits us best. We are not confined into being right or wrong in how we live our lives and what makes us happy. We are just a little over a year into our marriage and I couldn't imagine life any other way.

 To be honest not much has changed besides our legal status as a couple and our life insurance policies. Alex still leaves his socks everywhere and I still continually forget where I sat my phone/car keys/wedding ring. Marriage doesn't change us, but it does add something a little extra special to our lives.

Now I can describe myself as a loving cat mom, feminist, AND an amazing (at least I think I am) wife.



XOXO
Hayley