Prelude to a hurricane

Karl hovers on the sidelines

Before I left for Cancun, everyone lamented – it’s going to rain all week.  True, the forecast for the week is 90 percent chance of rain each day, but I’m not worried…and Casper – my traveling partner on this trip – could care less.  As a matter of fact, I’m all smiles because I know it will rain every day, but only for a short spell.  The rainy season is in June…a fact I discovered on a previously ill-timed jaunt to Cancun.

True to form, each day dark clouds form in the morning on the lagoon side.  They grow darker and more ominous as the day progresses.  By early afternoon they’ve grown restless, and they migrate, over-shadowing the beach.  Then they empty their load – which takes about five minutes – before dissipating, like nothing ever happened.  Daily highs are in the upper 80s, but the constant breeze makes it quite comfortable.  September really is a great time to visit.

Eerie calm in Cancun

But today I feel like I’m living an episode from the twilight zone.  This is highly unusual for Cancun.  The ocean is eerily calm…like a lake…not a whitecap in sight.  It’s quiet, too.  The sound of the surf is completely absent.  The water just laps at the beach.  There are no clouds on the lagoon side, and no breeze.  The summer tourists are gone, and Cancun seems melancholy in their absence.  But this is the calm before the storm, for off the coast hurricane Karl gathers momentum.

Casper is blind-sided

Although the hurricane doesn’t hit Cancun directly, the ocean turns angry after sleeping for two days.  The waves assault us with a vengeance…sometimes sneaking up on you from behind.  And this is the day the real story begins.  It was almost comical…because for me it happened in slow motion.  Casper went under, stood up, turned to face the beach, and wiped the water out of his eyes using his fingers underneath his glasses…just as another wave slammed into his back.   He recovered, but his sight was gone!  I don’t mean the ocean blinded Casper, only that it stole his glasses right off his face with such slight-of-hand, that he didn’t even realize it at first.

A minion has landed

After a futile search of the immediate ocean floor, Casper needed to buy a new pair. This is no easy task when you don’t speak the local language and cannot see.  He does have a prescription dive mask, but he looks like a minion wearing it on land.  After a good belly laugh at that, I started calling him Stuart (from Despicable Me), and we went in to town to get new glasses.  A taxi costs $20 from our hotel, or you can pay $1.00 each on the bus for the same trip…so we took the bus.  Our hotel concierge recommended Devlyn, so we found Ópticas Devlyn, an eyeglass outlet store in Plaza las Americas.  This is a modern mall complex with a cinema that seems to stretch on forever.

On a side note – it is right across the street from Plaza de Toros.  On my first trip to Cancun with my friend Robyn, I saw a bullfight here.  (I rooted for the bull.)   There is NO advertising for bullfights anywhere anymore.  I thought the arena was torn down or re-purposed.  But here we are…and the bullfights live on!

No English in Cancun…

At Ópticas Devlyn no one speaks English.  I raise an eyebrow at this now…with 20/20 hind-sight vision.  After several exchanges back and forth, Casper is able to get a pair of frames he likes with HD lenses not exactly matching his prescription, but close enough to get by with, and a turn around time of 2 hours.  He’s happy with that, and we decide to look around the mall while we wait.

I don’t wear glasses, so I don’t really know the procedure for getting a pair.  As it happens, the optician didn’t measure Casper’s eyes to find the focal point so the lenses would be centered in the frames for him.  Casper realized this about half an hour later, so we went back.  The guy said that since the lenses aren’t bifocals, you don’t have to measure.  (But he measured anyway.)  Two hours later we pick up the glasses, get the credit card receipt and everything seems fine.  I ask about the tax program, and the guy said to bring the receipt to the desk at the airport, and they would refund the tax.  Great!  Off we go.

The bright sunshine blinds me when we get off the bus back at the hotel, and I look at Casper.  “I thought you got HD lenses.  They didn’t have transition lenses with your prescription, right?”  I said, peering at him intensely.  He cocks his head, like a dog trying to understand you when you’re talking to it.  I continued, “One of your lenses is dark…”  He took off the glasses and sure enough, one lens is clear, the other is dark.

Sergeant Shultz lives on!  “I know nothing…”

I call the store, and the optician is conveniently not there.  The woman on the phone was there all afternoon, but she doesn’t remember us.  Of course she says to come in tomorrow, but our flight leaves in the morning.  Casper searches for an affiliate store stateside and calls them up.  They cannot do anything to reconcile overseas transactions, though.  At the airport Casper brings his receipt to the tax counter, and it turns out they neglected to give us the receipt for the exact goods and services rendered.  We only have the credit card receipt, and you cannot recoup the tax with it alone.

Now Casper pieces the story together, and he is mad!  What a racket!  They didn’t measure his eyes, so when we came back and called them on it, they had to replace the one lens they already put in.  They didn’t have another HD lens in stock with the same prescription, so they substituted the transition lens for one eye, and didn’t tell us.  Instead they chose to complete the order and hope we wouldn’t catch the mistake.  Once we leave the store, without the proper receipt they can play stupid, which they did, and keep the money.

Lying in wait for sweet revenge

Well, Casper paid with a debit card.  So as soon as we landed, he went to the bank and put a stop-payment on the transaction.  Interestingly, the bank teller had the exact same thing happen to him when he was there!  He was only too happy to process the stop payment.  So now Casper waits, hoping the shop will contact him to make good on the transaction, so he can unleash the Kraken!  The moral to the story…bring a spare pair of glasses and save yourself hours of headache and stress…and looking like a minion on a rampage.  Happy travels!