What if you quit your job . . . Sold everything . . . and bought a small hotel on the beach . . . South of Cancun, Mexico and down a long narrow road ending in turquoise blue water, you will find Soliman Bay. Here is where most people's dreams are found, a small bay, white sand and palm trees, and a reef just offshore full of colorful fish. If you are visiting, the dream looks real, but if you intend on staying the locals have one bit of advice - guard your sanity. Though it may not seem possible, this comedy you are about to read is 99% true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. May you laugh at our expense. Tropical Delusion Misadventures in Paradise By Jeff Ashmead iUniverse, Inc. Copyright © 2012 Jeff Ashmead All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4759-2192-2 Contents Prologue......................................xiThe Dream and The Reality.....................1Rough Start...................................18The Move to Mexico............................29Welcome to Paradise...........................42Road Duty.....................................55Ill Winds.....................................76Attitude Adjustment...........................94Finishing Touches.............................111Happy Innkeepers..............................131So This is Paradise...........................150Out to Sea....................................166Epilogue......................................195 Chapter One THE DREAM AND THE REALITY Liberty, I have come to believe, is when you have sold everything and all you have left is a big wad of cash. Paradise is a place you run to when you need to escape one of life's bad dreams. Sherry came across a real estate listing that looked to be an incredible deal, Casa Seis Machos, a six-bedroom hotel located on the beach on Soliman Bay, seventy-five miles north of Cancun, Mexico. When Sherry Googled the name, she found it had a rental website and called me over to take a look at what she had found. The home page picture was taken from out in the water just above the surface toward a palm-tree-lined bay, the beach had white sand, and a grass roof palapa stood just back from the shore with a hammock hanging in its shade. Rising behind this was the small hotel, two stories, brilliantly white, framed in windswept coco trees, its six patios gazing out over the Caribbean. It was beautiful. Sherry and I had met six years earlier, at about the time I was awakening from exactly the kind of bad dream I wanted to run away from. Divorce. It happens. There were no kids; there wasn't a fight, just this staggering realization that things were not what I believed them to be. Sherry, one might say, came to the rescue by helping me put distance between memories and living my life. We met in the course of my employment, standing in soggy mud and drizzling rain in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. A gas technician with two days of stubble armed with a notepad and a smile, I talked with Sherry about the installation of gas plumbing for her palace-to-be, which stood behind her in a cathedral of glue lams and plywood. It was then that Sherry locked her eyes on mine and started making plans that had nothing to do with her building. Sherry had worked for Hewlett Packard for thirty years, for the most part hopscotching around the world keeping projects for the multinational technology company on time. When most people retire from a job that demanding, they usually glide in and find a place to park. Sherry was just fueling up. She started visualizing us running away together early in our relationship; the million-dollar house she had just built, soon became, for her, another "been there done that" and it was now time to move on—plus, there were too many other attractive women in this part of the world. It was during a vacation to Cancun, twenty-four hundred miles away and a day trip down the coast to visit some ancient ruins, that, in the clear blue sky, lush jungle, turquoise Caribbean waters, and white sandy beaches, Sherry found the remote hideaway she was looking for. And I was soon convinced it would be paradise. The sunny photos on the Seis Machos website were enticing and, for me, foreboding. When Sherry got an idea in her head, she was a train moving at top speed. Sherry called the reservation number, and a lady answered in German. Unfazed, Sherry asked, "Hi, is the hotel still for sale?" and the woman quickly switched to English to tell her that the real estate listing had expired, but yes, it was still for sale. If we'd like to see it, the six partners and family would be there the following month. After a few more questions, Sherry hung up and emailed a few folks we had become acquainted with in Soliman Bay from our previous trips down there—what did they know about the hotel? One person replied that he had taken a look at it, but didn't like it. That the shore at that end of the bay was rocky with coral, and the neighbor ran a nudist