Help! I Need At Least 20 Pieces of Flare!

Errand Day. I spent the day zipping all over Cancun trying to gear up for the trip: grocery shopping, water, ice for the coolers, phone calls to LA, cleaning out the van and organizing all of my personal shit. Props to Mike who spent most of the day following me around while I “prepared”.
At night we cruised to the “Zona Hotelera” – the strip of ocean front land that houses the all inclusive hotels, the Senor Frogs and the souvenir/junk shops that make Cancun the tourist circus that it is.
Mexican Police Encounter #1 – Driving down the strip a cop car flipped on the cherries and berries stopped me right in front of the hotel we were heading to. At this point I was unprepared and did not have a copy of my license so (stupidly) I gave him my original. He told me that I would have to go to the station to pay my ticket and retrieve it OR I could pay him the fine right now and get it back. The fine was $100, no $80, no I mean $60… Oh, you only have $40… oh yeah, that’s right, I mean $40. A bunch of bullshit. I gave him the $400 pesos and he was on his way. We saw him 3 minutes later pulling over another gringo… a pretty good swindle.
Mike wanted to go to Carlos and Charlies, a famous Cancun tourist hotspot that is basically a Mexican Applebees. What a shit hole. It is the sum of all things that I hate about Cancun and cheesy corporate restaurants combined. Fat, obnoxious gringo families drinking margaritas out of oversized glasses, waiters with “crazy” Mexican sombreros writing their names on your paper table cloth in crayon and being obnoxiously excited about serving you crappy overpriced food with kooky names like “El Grande Nachos” and “Dan’s Diablo Super Poppers”. It was Mike’s intention to go there and watch the “tourist show” and it ended up being a pretty good idea. The food sucked – the oysters we ordered looked like they reuse the shells and fill them with bits of pre-frozen oyster chunks. NASTY! The “show” on the other hand was hilarious and disturbing at the same time. Hilarious – The Mom chaperone sitting with a group of high school kids while they slopped down shots, the group of 12 sitting next to us that clapped along to every song and danced on the tables, the family of 4 U.S. chunkers eating way more than they should all while Dad was checking out all of the waitresses asses, the choreographed dances that the wait staff were programmed to perform. Disturbing – the fact that the spectacle we were observing was the majority of the clientele’s idea of the perfect vacation. I can see it now – a family of four in Des Moines Iowa sharing a riblet platter at their local Applebees planning their 5 day all inclusive “adventure” in Mexico. Then, after their stay at the Cancun Hilton eating spaghetti dinners and bumping to J-Kwon and R Kelly Tunes at the Senor Frogs across the street, they can return and tell everyone back at the office all about the incredible cultural experience they had.