26 September 2011

Home of the taco

Day 3 brought us to our first port of call, Cabo San Lucas. Having never actually stepped foot in Mexico, I was quite excited to remedy that problem. But first a different problem had to be overcome: tenders!

The silly port was no where deep enough for the giant cruise ship to get anywhere near the dock, so it dropped anchor in the open water. Tenders, also known as lifeboats under more disastrous circumstances, were lowered and filled with tourists eager to spend money at Señor Frog's. The water was disagreeably choppy, which severely slowed down the loading process.

Eventually we, and the rest of our tour group, made it onto dryish land. I say dryish because it was horribly humid. Just to make things worse, the bus barely had any air circulation. Not cool, in every sense of the word.

I was glad to be out of the slow cooker, despite the sun beating down. We had bought tickets for a 4x4 tour along the beach and in the desert. I was picturing something a little more ATV-ish, but the Honda Big Reds were fine with me. With my left arm still lacking in the strength department, I was willing to let Matt stay in charge of the non-power steering wheel.


The tour was a lot of fun, and I even managed a few amazing pictures. One of the cars in front of us was clearly under the command of a complete moron who was determined to flip his vehicle, but they survived with nary a scratch, much to my disappointment.

Since our intended lunch time turned into tender waiting time, we were starving by the time we got back to the port. I decided it was taco time. Matt was smart enough to agree. I briefly considered Señor Frog's, as we had to walk past it to get to the dock, but I couldn't bring myself to go near the dancing waiters. Instead, I chose a slightly less cheesy tourist restaurant.

The tacos were not amazing, but they were in Mexico. And that made the meal worth it.

While we were still in port, I made another call to the eternal hold line run by Barnes & Noble. This time I used Matt's cell phone, which was slightly cheaper. The disturbingly chipper female on the other end helpfully explained that trying purchases again was not a bug, but a feature. I failed to care as long as she could fix the existing orders. Sadly, she had to individually fix each order, and the whole process was manual. In other words, it was not a short call. Before she could finish the process, the call dropped.

After much swearing like a sailor, in which Matt joined me, we used some more of our closely guarded intartubes to redownload our books, this time with useful licenses for most of them. One of Matt's books refused to correct itself, whether on the tablet or nook. I can only assume that it was lost in the ocean, perhaps being eaten by a lobster.

After much prodding, Matt couldn't find a more logical explanation for the missing license and was forced to agree with my theory. My missing book, on the other hand, fell victim to a worse fate. A fate known as NOT FREAKING RELEASED YET! Yes, that's right, no where did the damn nook store mention this little detail when I bought the book. It was declared to be a successful purchase just like all the others. 

When we return to Los Angeles, I am going to have some serious words with Barnes & Noble. They will be remedying this situation if they know what's good for them. At least we have the majority of our books, for now.

3 comments:

DHS said...

None of that would have been a problem on the kindle. Except for the aggressive vendors in the next post of course. Nothing can prevent those.

Anonymous said...

Not to be a snob, yeah...I agree with DHS. I have never had a problem like that with my kindle! Plus, Amazon's customer service actually picks up immediately, no prompts. Also also, you enter your number and they'll call YOU immediately. I'm such an amazon whore...

osmodion said...

Depending on how this gets resolved, I may be switching to amazon. And to be fair, I have heard of problems with the kindle, namely books being revoked after purchase.