“And so, when I heard a noise that woke me up, knowing that a bomb could go off and Clark wouldn’t hear it, I slowly opened my eyes to look around and was startled to see this huge man silhouetted in front of our opened patio doors.”

I wasn’t going to worry about their situation, as our next challenge was Harvey and his wife Alice. As we drove to Cancun to pick them up at the airport that January, I kept wondering what they would be like. Harvey, and likely Alice also, had lived their whole lives in the same small community as Carol, so I braced myself for more cracks about the number of Mexicans, showing distaste for the area, and not liking our open-air palapa.

The plan for that winter’s Mexico trip was for Mac and I to go to our usual west coast campground with our “beater” travel trailer for a month to visit and then say goodbye to the friends we’d made, before heading to the east coast to pick up my daughter Isabelle, also a diver, from the Cancun airport on New Year’s Day.