Three Shades Darker Than Completely Pale

Sun on all four sides is a bit intimidating and I might have gone a little crazy with the spf. I used 45 all week, the white coppertone kind, with the tiny round mirror embedded on the front of the bottle. The mirror would have come in handy if I had not had a friend around to advise me on whether or not all the lotion had been absorbed and also if the mirror hadn't gotten all gunked up from my greasy hands and fingers handling the bottle after applying the lotion myself. I ended up back in New York without a golden tan to remind me of my sunnier days during the previous week. I was just three shades darker than completely pale. Which kind of made me feel like a fraud. Here I was filled with sunny serenity, and yet didn't have the sun kissed cheeks to prove it.

I panicked, momentarily, fearing that my boss seeing my pale face post vacation wouldn't even believe that I was away, which wouldn't have been a big deal, except that by pure chance I chose one of the busiest/craziest weeks of the year, second only to the annual budget crunch and fiscal year end, to be out of the office. You can't just take off a week to clean out your garage. Time off during the second busiest work week of the year can only be accepted by higher ups if you purchased a non-refundable ticket to a temporary paradise that will refresh, renew and enable you upon return to work even harder than you did before, which is way harder than you ever thought you'd have to when you accepted the job.

Aside from my non-existent tan, I also brought back a few souvenirs and a new appreciation, or more accurately, a renewed appreciation of tequila. One of the waiters from "S" and my favorite beachfront restaurant greeted us each time we returned as Mr. and Mrs. tequila, and I liked it. We did order a tequila or 2 but I think the warm greeting and pleasure to see us return had more to do with our enormous generosity post tequila dinners, when we were all happy to be alive and tipping Mexican waiters 50% because we felt guilty paying less than 100 bucks for lobster for 2 with countless cocktails. He couldn't exactly call us Mr. and Mrs. Big Tipper, now could he?

We stumbled back from our dinners to our perfectly dreamy villa, where our bottle of Corralejo, shared by me, "S" and we realized later, the cleaning staff, awaited us. We sipped a few more under the most brilliantly starry nights, nothing but beach and possibility ahead of us and the rest of the world behind.