Cancún: A Friend's Birthday

A friend was turning a year older in late August and decided to celebrate by booking an all-inclusive in Mexico and telling everyone to show up. About a dozen of us did. Two nights at the Finest Playa Mujeres by The Excellence Collection, about 30 minutes north of the Cancun hotel zone.

Playa Mujeres is worth knowing about if you've been to Cancun and only stayed in the hotel zone. The hotel zone is a 14-mile strip of high-rises on a narrow barrier island between the Caribbean and Nichupté Lagoon. It's where most people go, it's where the nightlife is, and it's loud. Playa Mujeres is a planned resort community north of the strip on a quieter stretch of coast. The beach is wider. The crowds are thinner. The water is the same impossible turquoise. The trade-off is that you're 30 minutes from downtown Cancun and anything that isn't your resort, so if you want to explore, you're committing to an Uber. For a birthday weekend where the plan is eat, drink, pool, repeat, the isolation is the feature, not the bug.

The Finest operates on a different tier than the all-inclusive resorts most people picture. The rooms are full suites with living areas and private plunge pools on the balcony (not every category, but the ones worth booking have them). A swim-up suite means you step off your terrace directly into a pool. The resort has about nine restaurants: Japanese, Italian, Mexican, steakhouse, seafood, French, a buffet, a poolside grill, and a lobby bar that runs late. Quality varies. The Japanese restaurant was better than it had any right to be for a resort in Playa Mujeres. The Mexican was the strongest overall, which makes sense. The steakhouse was fine but not something you'd remember a week later. The Italian was average. The breakfast buffet was the unsung hero: omelette station, fresh tropical fruit that actually tasted like fruit instead of decorative objects, pastries baked on-site, and a juicing station with combinations that ranged from logical (orange-carrot) to ambitious (beet-ginger-celery, which worked).

The real value of all-inclusive isn't any single restaurant being outstanding. It's the freedom of never thinking about a bill. You eat when you want, drink when you want, order a second dessert, get a poolside cocktail at 11 AM, and the only thing you sign is the check-in form. After months of moving logistics and setting up a new life in Florida, that kind of mental break has real value. Your brain gets to stop calculating for 48 hours.

The pool situation is tiered. The main pool has the energy, the swim-up bar, the music. On a Saturday afternoon by about 1 PM, our group had claimed a section of lounge chairs and the birthday festivities were in full swing. There's a quieter adults-only pool on the far end of the property for when the main pool volume crosses a threshold. The beach is the best part of the whole resort: wide, white sand, Caribbean water that's warm enough to sit in for an hour without getting cold. This stretch of coast faces north rather than east, so the waves are gentler than Tulum or the hotel zone. You can actually swim and float without getting rolled by a wave every 30 seconds.

The spa at the Finest is included in some room categories and worth using even if yours doesn't include it. The hydrotherapy circuit (hot pools, cold plunge, steam room, ice room) is the thing to do the morning after a night of birthday drinking. The contrast between the hot and cold pools resets something in your body that a regular shower doesn't touch. Book a massage for the afternoon of your arrival day. You're on vacation. Start acting like it immediately instead of easing into it.

We did one dinner off-property at Lorenzillo's in the Cancun hotel zone. It's a lobster house that's been operating since 1983, built on the edge of Nichupté Lagoon with outdoor seating over the water. The live lobster tanks are in the dining room and you pick your own, which is either fun or unsettling depending on your relationship with your food. G picked the biggest one in the tank without hesitation. The birthday guy picked the smallest because he felt guilty. Both were excellent. The lobster is priced by weight and it's not cheap (Lorenzillo's is one of the pricier restaurants in Cancun), but the preparation is correct: grilled with garlic butter, served simply with rice and vegetables. Don't overthink the order. You're here for the lobster. Get the lobster. The bisque as a starter is rich and creamy and worth splitting. The sunset view from the outdoor tables over the lagoon, with the hotel zone skyline behind it, is one of the better dinner views in the area.

Getting to and from Lorenzillo's from Playa Mujeres requires an Uber or a prearranged transfer. The ride is about 30-40 minutes depending on traffic and costs around $30-40 USD each way. Worth it for one meal out, but it reinforces why most people at Playa Mujeres resorts eat on property for the majority of the trip.

If you have a free day, take the 20-minute ferry to Isla Mujeres. Rent a golf cart, cover the whole island in a few hours. Playa Norte on the north tip has calm, shallow water and almost no waves. The seafood restaurants on the west side are simple, fresh, and about a third of Lorenzillo's prices. We didn't make it over there. We were too committed to doing nothing by the pool, which G kept calling "self-care" and I kept calling "being lazy." Same thing, better branding.

Two nights. The birthday was celebrated. The pool was used. The lobster was eaten. We flew back to Fort Lauderdale tanned and tired, which is the correct condition for returning from Cancun.