I stumbled upon this place quite by accident during a day of intense web surfing. It was a cold and miserable weekend in January of 2002, and I was home sick with the flu. My head felt like it had been hollowed out and filled with concrete as I sat in front of the computer, my feet wrapped in a blanket, my eyes red and puffy, my nose had gone numb, and the chair in which I sat was surrounded by a mountain of used tissues.

In order to make myself feel better, I was looking for a late Spring vacation destination, proving my optimism that in spite of my present miserable condition, I would survive and recover by Spring. On several recent vacations, we had gone to Negril, Jamaica, and although we loved it there, we had decided to try some place different on our next trip.

Given that airfare to Jamaica was outrageously expensive at that time, an alternate destination was not only just something that we wanted, but was also going to be a necessity. What I found was that the best deals on airfare at the time from Chicago were to Cancun. We really didn't care for all of the glitz of Cancun, so I started looking into places where I thought that we might enjoy that were close to Cancun.

My first thought was to return to Cozumel, where we had spent a wonderful week back in the mid 80's. Cozumel, I found, had changed dramatically from when we were there last. The hotels were now mostly AI resorts, and there seemed to be a lot of them.

Ruling out Cozumel, I looked more into small hotels near Playa del Carmen. That looked good, but it seemed likely that we might need to rent a car there in order to get around. In a perfect world, I do not have to operate anything motorized while on vacation.

In my net surfing, I kept seeing the occaisional reference to a place called Isla Mujeres. Finally, I did a Google search on Isla Mujeres, and found a link to www.isla-mujeres.net. The slide show on the first page got my attention, then I found a wealth of information about the island from the many links on the home page. After looking through all of the information, I signed up for the message board, where I met a happy group of Islaholics who were eager to share their knowledge and their love of this tiny island.

Soon, I knew that this was the place for our next vacation. Although we had high expectations for a wonderful trip, you will see from reading these little stories that our expectations were far exceeded.