These were minor things in a whole week of beautiful people and beautiful places.

Travel
Biggest stress was covid tests and approvals day before leaving. But all worked out. Approvals came within 2-3 hours of submission. But still really stressful to test negative and get approvals that close to leaving. When we got there, my wife’s email would not download her QR code. They didn’t care and didn’t even look at them (they were checked in the States before we left). Lady at entrance just stamped our negative tests that we brought with approval to proceed. Saw masks in a few random places while there, mostly check-out people in grocery store. But almost nowhere else and very, very few. The most was in airport and was still maybe 1 in 50. Interesting that when you did see them, it was mostly a family unit. Not random. Also, we never bothered with temp checks. I don’t think anyone is monitoring.

Car Rental
Rented with Leisure and they were great as always. But first time I have had an incident. Crazy scooter tried to pass me while in a round-about (shopping day in the Salt Pickers one) and the rear of his scooter contacted the front of my car causing damage. He had damage too but blamed me for being a tourist and went on his way saying well, you will have to pay for that. Still waiting on process, but my credit card says it will pay for all. Will update when I do that and see how Leisure handles me.

Orient Beach
Seaweed – we watched on Thursday afternoon as a huge mass of sargassum came in. About as wide as the swim buoys and reached from those buoys to the beach. Amazing thing was that it only took minutes to come in. The chair workers even came out quickly to take pictures – probably to tell their boss that they were about to have a big job to do. Bad thing is, all the rest of our days there had seaweed on the beach. Even all mulched up in the surf so that everyone had to walk all the way down to end of beach in front of ruins to get in and cool off or take the occasional 'break'.

The beach was missing more sand since I was there last. The stone bedrock was exposed on some of the places along the beach where you walked and many rocks in water anywhere you went in. And the shoreline at the Club O end was up into one of the old cabana ruins now – part of the rope fence is fallen into water.

Almost no one in water just visiting and playing. And usually only a select handful walking the beach. Peaceful, but just quiet atmosphere.

Which was the other bad thing – everyday, if you went past the set up chairs and umbrellas, there were locals hiding in the ruins (and some even coming out much closer) to spy or follow certain people. They would move according to who came down their way that they liked and I saw one guy ‘take care of himself’ while following a couple.

There were cruise ships in four of our days and they mostly walked on through or partly participated late in the day. No real issues with them this time.

And two four-wheeler tours came. They were mostly ok – just made it crowded for a while and one group was pretty loud.

Shopping
Hated the badgering. You could not look anywhere and just browse and think about what you might want because it was constant and from every place. Several were nice. But just still forceful. Several (skin care place, some folks selling timeshares) would engage you in what you thought was innocent sincere conversation, then start in hard on you. Wasn’t for us. Didn't;t need anygting anyway.