At approximately 8:30am on February 22nd, 2024 m'lady and I were fully aslumber in the overt extravagance of our kingsize bed at the notably upscale Moon Palace in Cancun, Mexico when the phone rang us rudely awake.

"Hello sir," said the phone, "it is guest services calling to remind you that you have a tour of our Grand Palace Resort booked for nine o'clock this morning. Shall we send a cart to pick you up now?"

"Huh?!?" I insisted. "Wha!?!?" I continued.

"We called yesterday and cancelled the tour," I grumbled. "We don't want to do it anymore."

"But sir, are you sure you and your wife would not like to experience what the Grand Palace Resort has to offer? We will give you free spa credit and you will also get $200 towards band merchandise..."

"Yeah...no; we don't want to do it anymore," I reiterated in my sleepy gravelly voice before hanging up the phone like an exclamation point.

It was true: when we were checking in to the Moon Palace two days previous we had accidentally agreed to do their timeshare-that-they-insist-isn't-a-timeshare tour, and it was also true that the incentives included a couple of free massages plus a $200 credit at the Phish merch table. But the most important truth is that we had indeed called the front desk the day before and cancelled it (I had done the math and figured that attending Mexico Phish was costing the two of us at least $100 per hour, so sacrificing two-plus hours of our resort time for a $200 merch credit seemed like a losing proposition*).

But somebody hadn't gotten the memo, and no amount of tossing nor turning was getting me back to sleep no matter how tired I was. So I climbed out of the luxurious bed and into my crumpled hippie shorts and marched my grumpy self straight to guest services where they somehow charmed me out of my complaining and into taking the tour after all.

As I sit here typing, I can still hardly believe it.

The tour started with a really nice breakfast followed by a slow, relaxed meander through the most exclusive part of the already high-end resort. The closing room was absurd. It was a factory of smiling suits running around trying to pitch lifetime memberships to sleepy neo-hippies at $1.2 million a pop. The price eventually got comparatively low but still remained outrageously expensive. We were even clever enough to opt out of their final offer of prepurchasing a single week in the coming year for $1200 or some such bargain. They would present us with the same offer when we were checking out several days hence.

I will concede that it was pretty fun spending $200 at the merch table later that afternoon like we were buying prizes on the old Wheel of Fortune (remember when the contestants would spend their winnings on weird expensive prizes after every puzzle?). I got a shirt and a pair of shorts and a sticker. M'lady got about the same.

The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting up with friends and an early reservation for one of our "special" dinners at a chop house. It wasn't very good, or perhaps I just wasn't in the mood. Regardless, just before showtime we went for a whole other supper at an outdoor steakhouse, and it was great. It was like The Keg, only free (or prepaid, at least). When the waiter took my plate at the end of the meal instead of asking if I wanted dessert he asked if I wanted another steak. Give me that over a chop house any day. Plus, I was taught not to play with my food.

After dinner it was just a casual stroll along the beach to the venue. Along the way we ran into a posse of our American friends and we spent the show with them, and what a show it was!

When Phish started with a raging First Tube it felt like they had opened with the encore. Trey was holding his guitar up in the air ninja-style at the end of the song and everything. It was the beginning of what was simply a great set, and astoundingly (yet not surprisingly) the second set was even better. I swear I hit up the bar for my standard order of a trio of Jack and Cokes a dozen times or more. At the end of the show I grabbed three more prompting m'lady to eye me in wonder. “How can you still be standing?!?! You must have drunk thirty drinks!” I didn't have an answer, but I did have three more Jack and Cokes.

And thus, the pattern was solidified.

(Early in the show it occurred to me that I was dressed exactly the same as Trey. When have I ever gone to a Phish concert wearing a plain black t-shirt and beige slacks? It was uncanny, and I quickly slurred the coincidence into a running gag. I kept telling people that for the next show I was going to be dressed the same as Mike***.

*Same-same for the time it would take to for us to get massages, though admittedly that would be time getting massages, but I digress**.

**Yes, I can digress even within a digression.

***This could only be funny to people who know that Mike's wardrobe invariably costs thousands upon thousands of dollars. Okay, even then it wasn't that funny but seriously, dude wears $800 socks.

https://toddmanout.com/