Warning, this is a long and sentimental rant.
I can’t list Surfin as one of my favorite restaurants. Too limited on food, drink and view. But I can put it at the top of “where would you like to be right now”.
I travel alone a great deal. Wife Kim has just retired and we hope we can find strategies that allow us to travel together. We are experimenting!
In Cancun especially I do not have a conversation with anyone. Only a few of the riders on the 5:30 AM ride want to talk to an English and besides I am dropped, no one wants to ride slowly with me and talk.
Surfin is my once daily lunchtime conversation. Litterly, more than any other place in the world that I frequent, Surfin is uniquely designed for a desperate talker like me.
Before I introduce Surfin, let me introduce Danielle.
Danielle, you can bet I am spelling the name wrong, is from Columbia. For my last 5 years at Surfin, it has always been a go up and order and we will yell when your food is ready. Danielle was out front, helping people order, bringing the food, cleaning up. She worked a lot of night shifts instead of seeing me at the day but she really made the place for me.
Ok, so lets see what the place looks like. There are three bartop? tables very close to each other with 4 stools on each side.
I am at the middle table, my preferred place, I can talk to people at either of the other bartops. Surfin does a big business in coconuts filled drinks. That is the inventory on the left! Here is my normal adoring audience.
It is a hard life. This group was from London. Just in for a few days of sun. This is the view out onto the Hotel Road.
Again I am in my prefered seat, middle row. We do get a little entertainment now and again. This young man is staying at the hostel across the way that you can see in the above photo.
There is one other “Regular Event” at Surfin. Sorry I don’t have a video. There are probably 10 guitarists who work the Hotel Road daily. I see them regularly on the busses. They get on, play for the few stops, collect tip money and get off. One also comes to Surfin. He does not stay too long but he does interfeer with my purpose in being there, talking to people. It is hard to talk over the playing. I know, he is just a hard working guy. I’m selfish. I got a good laugh from Danielle when I asked her how much I could tip him to have him go away. Whenever he showed up in the future Danielle and the others behind the bar would catch my eye.
I really need to talk a little about the food at Surfin. Here is the main item:
On fills out the sheet on the left. I always get the same Chicken Spinach burrito. The reason I took this picture was to document that clearly this was not the green of a spinach wrap. Danielle was not on that day. Her substitute had to deliver the bad news that not only did they not have chicken and did not have spinach wrap but also the credit card machine was out.
The following shows you another part of my “Obsesivie Complusive” life.
The daily chicken Burrito with all the fixings can get a little runny so I started bringing my own tin foil for a “rewrap”. You can also see the normal Margarita in the jar and the Burrito as it has just arrived from the kitchen.
In the above, the Buritto has been properly dressed for the 1 hour afternoon social. There is an inner wrapper of Tom tin foil, outer wrapper of surfin tin foil and then 2 ripped open paper bags to catch any drip.
Another source of entertainment for me at Surfin is the Surf School next door. It is really by appointment only. They have about three small lockers. A couple years ago I picked up on the dude who is the boss. Here he is from 2019.
No, not the good lookin one in the blue shirt, the guy in the chair in back. I am of course using my patented technique of stealth photography, pretending to take a selfie. Covid has driven him out of the lawn chair and into a locker but here are some pictures of him in 2022.
There might be a little rain on the way! That is not just “Deep Blue” sky!
