A Very Bougie Lunch

Los Cabos Travelog #4
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Sat, 4 May 2024, 4pm

Our plan for today was simple: we'd get to our hotel in Los Cabos, check in, eat lunch, and figure out what to do for the rest of the day. The schedule got a little late with all the waiting at the airport after we landed. Then checking in at the hotel entailed so much personalized service it felt like the part of buying a car where the price negotiation is done and now you've got to finish all the official paperwork with the F&I guy. You know, the part where you're like, "Cool, I've made a deal on this great car, now I want to drive home!" except they want to show to sign a few forms and then show you how to unlock the doors and turn on the windshield wipers. But, hey, our room is amazing.

That amazing room is part of a swank resort. We knew that meant getting lunch at the hotel cafe by the beach would be an awfully bougie experience. Generally we don't care for bougie lunch. Normally we'd go somewhere off-site for a fraction of the price and none of the pretentiousness but it was a'ready late— 2:30pm by the time we able to start lunch— so we went to the cafe this once as the quickest solution. It was a bit more bougie than we expected.

Watch on YouTube

How bougie was it? Three things:

1. I arrived wearing a hat, so they brought me a hat rack to stand by the table.
2. They brought a battery powered fly swatter to keep flies away from our food.
3. The food was uninspired and bland, safe for people on their first trip out of Iowa, and the bill came to $133. 😨 (And that's with only one drink apiece.)

Wandering Around the Hotel & Los Cabos

Los Cabos Travelog #5
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Sat, 4 May 2024, 9pm

At lunch today— a very bougie lunch— we made plans for the rest of the day. Originally we thought we'd spend time this afternoon on the beach, but the beach here is one of those "Look, but don't go in the water" beaches. Though there's welcoming looking sand, the waves are fierce and crash on rocks at the sand's edge. It's because we're on the Pacific Ocean side of the peninsula. It was similar at another Cabo hotel we stayed at years ago. At least on Monday we're changing venue to a hotel on the Sea of Cortez, where the waves will be safer to enter.

Instead of walking on the beach after lunch we took a short tour around the hotel.



One of the restaurants at the Waldorf Astoria is this swing bar. As in, you sit on a swing. I might have tried it for the novelty, though getting liquored up on margaritas and then trying to stay balanced seems like a bad idea. Plus, the drinks here are wicked expensive. They are really good though. The complimentary margarita they brought me at check-in— the one they handed me as I stepped out of the car— was phenomenal.



One thing we wondered about our room is how much of an upgrade we got. I mean, the basic rooms here looked amazing from the photos I saw when I booked. Having a private pool on our balcony made it amazing. But on our walk around the resort we saw that most room have private pools— and some are way larger than ours. For example, the photo above shows a two-level townhouse with a plunge pool big enough for a whole family. Our upgrade wasn't to the top room type or even second to top. It's more like second to bottom. But wow, it's still amazing.



After a tour while there was still light we decided to walk out to downtown Los Cabos. For as remote as our hotel feels, with the ocean on one side and forbidding cliffs on the other, there's a tunnel through the mountain that opens onto a street just a block or two from the edge of the city marina and city center. We walked out there to visit the flea market and the city's many jewelry shops. I'm not much for that kind of shopping but Hawk loves it.

The sellers at the flea market seemed kind of tired after a long day. We'd spotted a big cruise ship in the harbor when we rode in from the airport a few hours earlier, so likely thousands of tourists had already passed through here. But the streets were at least quiet when we came through.

The jewelry in the flea market was mostly crap, as we expected. Hawk is good at assaying stones in a second or two, sorting out real stones from paste and good stones from cheap stones— plus good paste from cheap paste. 😅  The town's many jewelry stores were better quality, unsurprisingly. We visited several as Hawk was curious to see different examples of fire opals, the region's specialty. But even there there were varying levels of quality. And we did find one fire opal necklace that she liked and I thought looked amazing on her... but she was concerned about the composition of the metal in the chain.

We came back empty handed from shopping. ...Well, empty except for a few drinks and sweets to eat in the room this evening. We decided we'd just snack for dinner, seeing as our lunch was late. And very expensive.

Back at the room we spend the whole evening in the plunge pool. It's like, why even use the hotel's pools when we have a private one to ourselves? We sat for a few hours and ate the complimentary chips and guacamole the hotel brought to our room while we were out.

By 9pm now I'm feeling pretty wiped out. It seems too early to go to bed, though it's reasonable as I've been up since 5:30am.