Timeshare Heaven, Part 3 (the last one haha)

On entering her “office”, Patty informed us that whenever a deal was struck, you’d hear a champagne cork popping, and traditionally everyone dropped what they were doing and cheered the lucky buyers. OK, this seemed fairly innocuous, but this actually was our first clue that we were possibly dealing with aliens. She started off the hardcore sales pitch time with a high-tech glowing wall map tour of the developer’s various properties around Mexico (6 total, all on the Pacific side except one in Cancun) and then walked us through some large screen survey designed to show us the shocking amount of money we will spend on vacations over the next 30 years. I bet you can see where this is going, huh?

She then escorted us out to the deck. We were on the 6th floor and the deck had a sweeping view of Cabo bay - we could see Finisterra (Land’s End) all the way around to where it curves up towards San Jose del Cabo. Really amazing. See our sunny faces here in the picture Patty insisted on taking. She led us back inside and sat us down. Call this “the beginning of the end”….

Just a few moments later a waitress came over and offered us mimosas. We accepted, and she popped the cork (but wait…Patty said the corks were when someone bought something….huh?). All of a sudden everyone in the room who looked like they worked there dropped what they were doing and started clapping. It was freaky. Like some sort of south of the border stepford wives moment.

Patty dove into her stuff. Showed us the network, showed us all about how we could trade points for places around the world, etc. During the process she frequently called upon the assistance of her manager, Chris, who was incidentally also from Seattle area. We were like yeah, right, but then he described where he’d lived in Issaquah and where he’d worked and stuff so he seemed legit. He was really pretty straightforward. He basically said, honestly, I was a guy just like you - came to Cabo for vacation, ended up buying a timeshare, now I sell them because it’s lucrative, I am done by 2pm every day, and I get to live here.

Pop goes another cork in the distance. Auto-clap initiated. Someone shouts from the corner “Hey we need a new owner’s packet here!” Every once in a while some guy who mysteriously resembled a used car salesman would walk by Patty and tell her to “take another thousand points from the pool”. She seemed fairly annoyed by these cheesy interruptions, something that elevated her in my points scale because, well, they were cheesy.

Now I could lay down a hundred more words here to describe the various goings on during the rest of the morning. Yes, we were way past that 75 minutes at this point. But instead of belaboring you with tales of ever-decreasing offers and more alien applause I’ll just tell you.

We are timeshare owners now. :) We took the honeymoon deal. One week every other year in any of the 6 properties, plus membership in the discount worldwide hotel network. We’ll be helping them christen their new property in Loreto, on the Sea of Cortez, sometime in 2011. Pop goes the champagne!...