Rosarito Resort Debacle

January 22, 2020

The resort was an amazing place and worth its value so far. Last night however, I heard more and more ominous news reports coming out of China about this coronavirus in Wuhan. It seemed my colleague earlier was not only right, but this myserious SARS-like illness was ramping up like crazy and Wuhan on the verge of a lockdown to try and stop it. It was all over the news and people were getting sick left, right, and center. People were trying to mask up but those were in major shortage.

Thank goodness I had left. Here in Mexico that was now worlds away. I was watching all the horror stories while chilling on the beach at a resort.

The next day I was all set to go and ready to check out early to cross back into LA for a double header fitness class. My heart sank when I saw a sign saying that the office was only open from 2pm to 8pm. I could just check out by throwing the key into the box I would lose my deposit. After a few phone calls, the clerk said she'd wire it to a bank account but I didn't trust her with this and insisted on picking up the cash in person. She said, "That's why we don't like to take cash for the deposits to begin with." Fair enough but it was my mistake for booking this place.

It was finally decided that I'd have to wait until 2pm. I was mad as hell about that as it would mean needing to cancel on my fitness classes but there was no other option at this point unless I wanted to eat $200.

I headed to the beach and started drinking margaritas to pass the time, and made sure to limit them. Once 2pm finally rolled around I got my deposit back minus $50 and I demanded to know what that was about. She pointed to a sign saying a hotel fee of $15 a day applies and that is mainly for the Wifi. There was no point in arguing about this, I said fine, and then wrote a nasty review on both Agoda and TripAdvisor.

Run, don't walk away from these dodgy ATMs

You'd have to be pretty stupid to use these.

Thankfully I knew how to get back to the border quickly using the collectivo vans and did that while crossing around 4pm. It was super easy getting back into the US and for whatever reason the crossing was almost deserted at that time on a Thursday afternoon. I then waited an hour for a bus going back to LA which went smoothly.

This is a rare sight, the approach to the US border is almost empty of cars. No idea why, this was 5pm on a Thursday.

By then it was getting late. Once off the Greyhound bus in LA I managed to help someone else out get a city bus to Santa Monica even though I had never done that before. That made me feel like a local although I wasn't.

I started walking around Skid Row late at night but I wasn't afraid. How could I be afraid after having survived Tijuana? It was easy enough to catch the buses to the metro and then out to Culver City where my next Airbnb was. The host probably wasn't so happy that I stumbled in so late after my supposed original plan of 3pm but I explained about what happened in Mexico and she got the drift.

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