MEXICAN RIVIERA

Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, amd Matzalan. I'm pretty sure Acapulco is also included, but not on our brief trip.

We took a short cruise on short notice. Price reduction had almost everything to do with it That and the continuing heat in AZ.

Thirty-five hundred other passengers plus crew put our Royal Carib ship at over 5,000. It also solidified RC's Number 1 rating as our favorite cruise line.

So why? So why do we like to cruise? I'll answer that with another question. What's not to like? Even on bad weather days, there's plenty to do on board. There's so much to do, in fact that on the 7-day cruise, I didn't even make it to the climbing wall, golf putting greens, or golf simulator, or exercise room.

Two days of golf, one day on a 72-foot (I wonder why that's not feet?) yacht with 23 other excursion passengers, and 4 sailing days constituted the trip. A highlight, besides golf, was the salsa in Matzalan--the best ever. That was at the Robert Trent Jones course. There were three groups of us and we finished over 1 hour ahead of the others, so we had plenty of salsa time in the clubhouse restaurant.

The food on the ship was really outstanding, too. Entertainment was very good and performed at a decent hour for early to bed, early to rise folks like us.

If you've never cruised, do it. Just check it out closely before you do. For example, we had left over pesos from earlier Mexican journeys. My wife was puzzled when she said, "I think we have $1,700 in pesos. How could we? We never spent that kind of money?"

And she was absolutely right. It had been devalued or redevalued in 1993, making our pesos worth $1.75. So check closely. That wouldn't even have paid for our salsa.