A whirl through Veracruz, Mexico

 History, Coffee, and Rafting

January is best used for a break from the cold, and this year we explored Veracruz, Mexico. Veracruz is on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and is notable for being the state where Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and started his conquest.

The planned itinerary was 9 days long, leaving early Saturday and returning Sunday of the following week.

A note to those wanting to visit Veracruz: some Spanish knowledge is immensely helpful, but with Google translate, you should be able to replicate this itinerary yourself. My Spanish level is "1-year high school Spanish" plus "I've made it through all of Duolingo" and can construct silly phrases like "towel for the hands" when I forget the word for napkins, but often get tripped up by knowing that there's a correct conjugation for the tense I'm looking to use. I try to practice it with neighbors, but often look forward to a trip that forces me to use it. The people we encountered on this trip generally had limited English, if any at all, though once in a while, a fellow tourist from a bigger Mexican city would chime in to help.

Veracruz City

We spent the first two nights exploring the Centro area of Veracruz City, which includes its active port. At mid-70s with 40-50 mph wind gusts, it was unseasonably cool and windy, and so we couldn't take advantage of snorkeling, or even the hotel pool. We still managed to explore the Veracruz port boardwalk, called the Malecon. It was filled with people enjoying the waterfront views, and activities and vendors were out selling to locals and tourists alike. While drinking lechero, an expresso drink with lots of milk poured tableside, we watched a dancing Spiderman try to entice people to take a double-decker bus tour of Veracruz.

After dinner, during which it rained, we went to the Zocalo where Veracruz City is known for having live music and/or traditional dances in the evenings. And indeed, we stumbled across a live band and couples dancing to the music. The Mexican zocalos we've been to are all such vibrant places where people gather and sit, or even dance, and Veracruz City was no different. The dancers were older and of different skill levels.

Between songs, couples get ready to dance or take a break.

The next day, I developed a bit of nausea, from the wind, I think. I sat in a park for a bit, trying to spot the local parrots squawking away in the palm trees. We grabbed a light bite at "Tacos David", where there were only two types of cochinita pibil tacos, served in soup. You order by the taco and I felt very silly ordering just one, but I was worried about my stomach. I immediately felt better upon going inside and sitting down, so I'm convinced the wind made me nauseated.

Too windy to comfortably walk around, we decided to check out the naval museum for the afternoon. Almost everything was in Spanish, but in plain language, so I spent most of my time just looking at the exhibits themselves, only taking the time to parse out the Spanish for things that seemed interesting.

The museum is the former site of the naval academy, and the exhibits are focused on the history of the Mexican Navy (including some maritime history that predates the navy itself), including a room dedicated to those who died during the American invasion of Veracruz.

There are interactive exhibits, including one where you have to navigate a ship through the busy Veracruz harbor, and also an opportunity to pretend to fire a very large gun.

Pretending to aim a cannon.

We enjoyed another lechero with a concha at another cafe on the same block as our first cafe and went back to our hotel to rest a bit and research local bars for a pre-dinner drink, preferably one that was near the zocalo so we could be away from the cars.

Our pre-dinner timing meant that there weren't many options, but there was a brewery on the zocalo itself. The beer itself was fine (I'm not a beer enthusiast) and seemed to cater more towards tourists, but we got to sit outside and watch the cultural performances on the stage.

We stayed at the Hotel Emporio on the Malecon, which was well-located and had three pools for normal Veracruz weather. While the hotel was comfortable and we had a nice view, we ultimately didn't get to enjoy the pools because of the unseasonably cool weather.

View from the room balcony of a cargo ship docked in the harbor

Sunny but windy and cool day by the pool. It was too cold to swim.

The next morning we were off to Coatepec, the coffee capitol!

Coatepec

We walked the 40 minutes from our hotel to the Ado bus station, where there were frequent intercity buses, including to Xalapa, the capitol of Veracruz. I couldn't manage to get tickets online for some reason, so we had to buy tickets at the station, but this was very easy. A few minutes later we were on a luxury 2-hour bus ride to Xalapa, where we'd then take a 20 minute taxi to Coatepec.

The taxi from the Xalapa bus station was a bit confusing - you pay your fare at an official stand and then the person hands you a ticket, or in our case three, to hand to your driver. The fare was 200 mxn, which was more than what Uber was quoting, and our cab driver was also confused why there were three tickets, but it was convenient. A harrowing 20-30 minutes later, with me giving turn directions, we were at our hotel Meson del Alferez. We were the only guests at this hotel for 2 of our 3 nights, but breakfast was cooked to order every morning and our room was spacious and comfortable. We had picked it over other similar hotels because they had AC, but it turned out we needed the heat instead!

On our drive into Coatepec, we were greeted by the smell of roasting coffee, unfortunately mixed with the smell of exhaust. I saw a woman making tortillas in a restaurant that looked busy and determined that was where we were going to eat lunch.

It seemed as if every third storefront was a cafe, of which half of those did their own roasting.

After checking in and dropping off our bags, I navigated us to Restaurante El Deleite. We were worried that it was full and close to closing time, but the people warmly welcomed us in and sat us upstairs, where there were even more tables. It wasn't as naturally lit upstairs and two TVs were showing Garfield in Spanish. We would have preferred to eaten downstairs, with more natural lighting and being able to people watch, but the food everyone was eating looked delicious and it was busy.

There was a menu, but nothing looked like what the others were eating, so I asked the waiter if it was the menu. He said no (it was for breakfast) and told us there was a set menu. He rattled off the options in Spanish, and after patiently repeating it slower so I could understand, we ordered soup, and one mole chicken entree, one lomo in white sauce entree.

We were given a large pitcher of refreshing hibiscus water, lightly sweetened. The soup came, and I had made a mistake ordering the first course (oops). The carrot "sopa" option I thought I was ordering wasn't called a sopa, so I had gotten the sopa option, which turned out to be spaghetti pasta chopped into 1" lengths in a broth. It was tasty anyway, so I'm only a tiny bit disappointed. Our entrees came out after we finished the soup and were also delicious, both served with a side of rice and beans and a basket of fresh tortillas. After that, we were served an unknown dessert, passion fruit in flavor and pudding in consistency. When we asked to pay, the waiter told us one hundred and twenty. I repeated it to make sure I heard correctly, and he clarified it was 60 for my husband and 60 for me. It would bug my husband for days how anyone could sell a chicken leg quarter in mole for 60 mxn as part of a three-course meal and still make money.

We had a lighter dinner at Chejere with two beautiful and delicious salads and a very large bean dip to balance out our lack of vegetables, often a problem when we travel to Mexico. Over the years, we've gotten a bit more adventurous with eating raw fruits and veggies, or consuming ice, but we limit those risks to places that are busy and with good reviews.

The next day, we had coffee at two different cafes, and then took a walk through the Cerro de las Culebras Park, where there was a good lookout over the city.

View of Coatepec through the trees

After lunch, we took a taxi to Xalapa to see their anthropology museum. I flagged down a Xalapa-based taxi at the bus stop to Xalapa, and he quoted us 100 mxn for the ride. If we had had more time, we would have tried the bus option, but the bus would have dropped us off a bit far from the museum.

We had the museum basically to ourselves. It was an interesting layout; each level was separated by a few steps and represented another piece or location of the Veracruz region. Alternating levels would have a larger exhibit to the right, sometimes it was a large room with artifacts, sometimes it was a garden with some more sculptures.

The tiered downwards main hallway of the Xalapa Anthropology Museum

One of many Olmec heads housed in the museum

Some artifacts with a bowl/plate-like items on top of some pottery with human faces and jug-like bodies.

Some clay sculptures of animals

A clay jug with a human head and a short, squat body with arms.

It was raining when we left the museum, and so after a brief walk, we flagged down a taxi and negotiated a 200 mxn fare back to Coatepec. We didn't get to see Xalapa, unfortunately, but the museum was great.

On our third day, we had planned a coffee tour and then a bus-ride to Xico. We did the coffee tour but then my husband did not feel well during lunch. We sat down at the hotel for a bit, and unfortunately, it got worse for him, and he did not leave the hotel or eat anything for the next 24 hours. We're not sure what got him, as we shared everything we ordered and I was fine. It was cold and he was shivering a lot, so we turned on the heat to warm him up.

Xico was out of the question for him, and I did not feel like making the trip to a known slippery waterfall on my own when it's off-season for tourists. I instead walked around town and tried to figure out the intercity bus system frequency by watching a bus stop for an hour. Verdict: Xico-bound buses seemed to come from Xalapa about every 10-15 minutes, but lots of other buses as well.

Coatepec spelled out in front of a two-story Municipal Building with impressive columns, arches, and doors.

A mural painted inside a stairwell of the Municipal Building

I had dinner at Coco Roll, a Japanese restaurant. It was empty, but I was there for stir-fry noodles with vegetables, so I wasn't too worried. I had a good laugh overhearing the kitchen staff practicing their English; I was expecting someone to come out and try using it, but nobody did. Other people eventually came in to enjoy the sushi. Coatepec had a handful of sushi restaurants, which I was surprised about, and they all had good reviews, including this one. The main square was lively, even though it was a weeknight and a bit chilly.

The Coatepec letters at night. The Municipal Building is lit up with the main portion a bright white and the side portions a regular street-light color.

The next morning we picked up our laundry and had our hotel call us a cab to Jalcomulco. There was a bus, but other than a picture on a Facebook page, we didn't know when or where it picked up, and a cab would probably be more comfortable for someone recovering from a 24-hour bug. They arranged the price (350 mxn) and the cab was more comfortable and in better shape than the ones we had been hailing between Xalapa and Coatepec.

Jalcomulco

I found out about this town in the guidebook of Lonely Planet. The original plan was to try to organize a package where they would pick us up in Coatepec for a rafting trip + stay, and then drop us off in Veracruz City. However, the town sounded charming and we wanted a slower pace, so we opted for two nights at the Picocanoa Rodavento and booked the rafting with our hotel.

Jalcomulco seems like a town with more dogs than cars, and even the road crossing signs tell you to watch for children and dogs. I picked a place that had good reviews and was along the river to have an afternoon snack, and something light for the recovering stomach. There were people eating cocteles, basically seafood in cocktail sauce, and I decided to risk having one as others in the restaurant were eating them too. It was sweet, so I'm glad I ordered a small size.

We walked across the suspension footbridge into the rest of town and walked around one of the blocks before we turned back to spend some time next to the hotel pool.

The river that we'd be rafting down, taken from the footbridge

The main intersection of Jalcomulco. Some parked cars but the street is otherwise clear.

Jalcomulco spelled out under some colorful decorative flags in a plaza with a stage.

We had opted for a safari tent room and it was surprisingly bug free. I'm a bug magnet, so part of the planning had been filled with apprehension about not liking Jalcomulco for the bugs. It might have been that there just was a cold front, but I only got a few mosquito bites outside of the room. We had drinks by the pool at night before wandering into town for pizza (both nights, different places). The town was pretty empty, just a few locals (dogs included), and us, but it was nice to walk around a bit and see the town and the small-town nightlife.

Breakfast was also amazing and included a lot of fresh fruit. A group of teenagers and a corporate group were also at our hotel, but other than the late night laugher of the corporate group doing team-bonding exercises, we had some very good sleep.

View from tent in the morning - lots of green bushes with red flowers and trees.

View from a few feet away from our tent, a red dirt path bordered with large stones cuts through greenery.

We did some fun white-water rafting (instructions all in Spanish) through our hotel; they drove us 20 minutes upstream and we rafted back to our hotel. There was a climbing wall and you can go canyoning or rappelling arranged through the hotel as well. It was a welcome change from our more urban days on this trip and we just relaxed and read by the pool when we weren't rafting or drinking or eating.

Before our last night in Jalcomulco, and two nights before our flight home, we received word that our flight was cancelled due to Winter Storm Fern. Our flight home was through Dallas, and the timing was such that even if we were to make it to Dallas, Fern would be hitting Boston when we were leaving Dallas. I love a big snowstorm, so I was a bit sad to miss it, but it was really nice to get advance notice of the cancellation, because it meant we knew we could spend an extra day at our next hotel, which was by a sandy beach in Veracruz, and this time, it would be swimming weather.

This was also the first time since getting one of those fancy travel credit cards that I would get to try out the Trip Delay Insurance benefit.

Veracruz City, Beach Edition

For our flight home, we didn't want to be too far from the airport, so we had planned one final night in Veracruz City, but on the beach instead of in the historic Centro. We stayed at a modern, boutique hotel called X'kan, and it was a calm and quiet place, very different from the intersection and streets that were less than half a mile away. The hotel shares a restaurant with a popular seafood restaurant chain, and they reserve tables for hotel guest use only. The wait-staff is very attentive and also serve the pool-side chairs or the beach-front chairs. The pool was actually a bit warmer than the ocean, so we spent more time in the pool, but it was a nice shallow bit of ocean as well. Not a bad way to spend a day, but also really nice way to spend a surprise vacation day.

An orange cocktail on a white table cloth, in front of a sandy beach with some small waves.

The view from a poolside lounger. The pool is to the right, and the sandy beach and ocean is to the left.

In the wake of Winter Storm Fern, our flight, one day later than originally planned, appeared to be on track to leave, so we went to the airport. With only a minor delay, we were up in the air, hugging the Mexican coast, and it seemed like we were on our way. Our flight crew gave a shoutout to one of the flight attendants, who is normally an office worker, but was called to help man the flight, which would have otherwise be cancelled. Veracruz was back to another windy cold front, so staying at the beach wasn't as welcome, but it was nothing compared to what we were going to experience back in the US.

Dallas/Fort Worth

We land in DFW a bit late, I noted that it was 5 PM on a Monday and the roads were empty, and we had a tight connection. I'd seen that all morning flights between DFW and BOS were cancelled, and two earlier ones were having serious delays. Our flight was the last one to depart, so I wanted to try to get on an earlier flight if possible. We got through customs and immigration quickly, but then we were in Terminal D. There were two Boston flights we could possibly get on, but they were in different terminals. One of them was near our scheduled flight, so we make a plan to try to get to that gate first.

This is not normally a big deal, except the Skylink between terminals was experiencing issues in one direction. We get on the Skylink the opposite direction, the doors close, and I immediately get a notification that our scheduled flight was delayed and now departing Terminal D. So now, we're on a crowded Skylink train, heading the long way to a flight that says it's boarding, and away from our scheduled gate. I see that the other option is technically closer and it appears to have more seats, so we get off halfway through and run to the gate. The plane is still at the gate, but the door is closed. Well, bummer, time to head back to Terminal D.

We're tired now and so we figured we'd go hang out at the Capital One lounge, but that was closed due to weather. Luckily our tickets got us into an American Airlines lounge, where we ate some food and waited for our flight. Boarding time came, and so we went downstairs to our gate, only for them to cancel the flight minutes after we arrive. Multiple flights flip to cancelled minutes later and it's a mad rush to get into customer service lines. The airline website isn't responding, and we also have to make a choice whether to sleep in the airport or get a hotel. The airport hotel is booked, and I didn't trust Dallas drivers in icy conditions.

My husband insisted, and we call around to find a hotel that has vacancy. We didn't book it because we were worried about getting a cab, but the hotel said they were half empty, so we got in the cab line. At 11:45 PM, we checked into a hotel in Lewisville. We shared a cab with others, and so I wasn't paying attention to the road other than the road wasn't fully plowed. The parking lot of the hotel is a solid sheet of ice.

We got about 3.5 hours of sleep, and we were ready to make it back to the airport for a 7 AM flight. This is when I noticed the roads. The streets looked like ice rinks, clearly a sheet of ice. The toll roads were the scary part - our cab driver would see black and think it's asphalt, and gun it. I could clearly tell that was black ice. There would be some fishtailing and he'd brake a little and change lanes, but then try to change lanes again when there was a vehicle he thought about overtaking. Luckily there weren't many vehicles.

We have breakfast at an airport cafe, which has a limited menu because of the weather, and we wait for our flight, but there is no aircraft at the gate. The crew appears to be there, so we're in good shape on that front. We have about a 30 minute delay, and then we board the plane. We're warned that there is only water and coffee/tea, nothing else. The plane has been in a hangar for a few days, and they need maintenance people to reconnect things. Then we need to deice the plane. We finally get to the runway a few hours later, the engine revs, we start moving, and then we immediately brake. We circle the runway a few times, and the captain comes on to say we're returning to the gate because they got some sort of warning light.

The crew comes to check out the warning light, which apparently is because the plane had been sitting for a while, but we're given the all-clear to leave again. But now we need fuel and it's another wait for refueling. And then we have two passengers who decide now that they want off. But this time, we do manage to take off and was relatively uneventful into BOS, where the roads were cleared and deiced. 

Time to shovel a long driveway full of snow, about two feet deep.

I could have done without the stay in Dallas, but we were home with some extremely fragrant bags of freshly roasted Coatepec coffee and Mexican chocolate.

Epilogue: Claiming Trip Delay Insurance

On February 1, just a few days after arriving home, I filed a claim with our credit card benefits for the costs associated with our delay. Our credit card claimed to offer $500/per passenger/trip in reimbursements. It was unnecessarily stressful because I had read that you should submit all of your documentation all at once and there was no save button. It turns out they meant create the claim, submit it, and then upload all your documentation all at once. I kept getting logged out trying to get documents downloaded and uploaded, so I had to start over three times.

About a week after we submitted the claim, we received notice that we needed to upload more information, including official airline statements that our flight was cancelled due to weather. This was very easy to obtain from American Airlines. I uploaded both, and also had to upload our original (well, second round) and final boarding passes.

After a few days, I logged in again to check the status, and noticed that one of the flight cancellation statements hadn't been uploaded for some reason. I uploaded it again.

On February 18, we received word that our claim was approved and that we would be receiving a check in a few business days. Although we splurged in Mexico, it was Mexico and so we weren't near the claim maximum. This meant we could also claim, and fully cover, the Dallas-based expenses. I uploaded receipts of everything we spent from the minute our original flight was supposed to depart, until we arrived to our driveway buried under the snow.

I'm pretty pleased with our Venture X benefits.