1-29-06

Paul here at an internet booth in Playa del Carmen with Miles next to me on his own computer pleading with his friends and classmates to send him e-mail. Because we haven't done a homestay yet, the kids haven't been able to meet up with other kids and they get a bit tired of each other's company. There's some TV show in english playing somewhere else in this computer shop and although I'm choosing to block out what they're saying on the show, there's a wave of canned laugh track that seems to flow over this shop in a regular cycle.

It's Sunday, and we've wrapped up 3+ weeks in Playa del Carmen. This past week was ours without a spanish instructor and we took the opportunity to travel. Monday morning we caught a bus from Playa to Chichen Itza. Although the bus was in excellent condition, complete with functioning bathroom and numerous video screens, it was a four hour journey nonetheless.

There seems to be a "Mexican Bus Film Genre" which usually means a shoot-em-up American movie with either subtitles or overdubbed in Spanish. Our first film was some whacky story about Matthew McCaugnahy and Penelope Cruz chasing confederate coins and nuclear waste throughout the southern Sahara, and because of the length of the trip, we were blessed with a second feature which involved Val Kilmer trying not to assissinate the president of the US in some podunk Southwestern town. The combined body count of the two films was way beyond my spanish counting skills. (Another feature of Mexican Bus Cinema is that I rarely catch the titles of the movie.)

Upon arriving at the ruins in Chichen Itza, my son, the observant one, counted 27 toilets in the very nice restroom at the ruins.

Miles had heard of Chichen Itza last year in school where it was nicknamed Chicken Pizza (I thought this was a Hinesburg Exclusive until a time share guy in Playa offered us a trip to "Chicken Pizza"). The ruins experience was good, though the kids had hoped to be able to climb to the top of the Castillo and we didn't learn until we arrived that that was now forbidden.

We found a nice little "posada" (inn) in next door Piste before walking back to the ruins after dark for the light show. We opted out of the English translation headset which was just as well since the Spanish was gruesome enough as the ancient Mayan woman described how honored she was to offer her firstborn child as a sacrifice to the gods. The Strauss waltz over the loud speakers prior to the light show was a little odd, but it was a beautiful star-filled night in the middle of the Yucatan, so no complaints.

We chummed up with some other travellers at the light show who we had talked to on the bus. They were an older crew from Boise, Idaho. While on the bus and trying to ignore the blood and guts on the screens around us, a Boise guy and I talked. His sister-in-law lives in Vergennes, Vermont and is a nurse practioner for an organization that serves young and unwed parents. Well, wouldn't you know, after the light show and after dinner at a small restaurant in Piste (more later) we went up a mysterious 3 flights of stairs to find a top-floor internet lab. And when we checked or email we learned that a leading prospective tenant for our vacant apartment in Vergennes (a source of minor cash flow stress for Yours Truly) is a health care professional who will be working with an organization in Vergennes that serves young and unwed parents. I love it! He (she?) is from Dublin, travelling in Nigeria, but wanted an address where to send first month's rent and security deposit in US dollars. I hope it all works out and I am very grateful to our housesitters who are handling this stuff.

Dinner in Piste was at a little shop with about 4 tables and an owner who couldn't see very well. She cooked good food though we had our suspicions whether the spots on the tortillas were mold spores or hot spots from a griddle. For entertainment, the TV was playing Mexican ranchera music videos which were a welcome change from the usual MTV-VH1 load we see everywhere else. And for additional pleasure we were hustled by 3 young boys trying to sell us souvenirs (no spell check in a spanish computer lab). The kids were around Miles and Jill's ages and we had a lot of fun talking with them even though they were feeding us a line of bull. It turns out the rock carvings are really plaster of paris and do not come from the Sacred Cenote (cavern) as promised by the 10 year old sales leader.

Tuesday morning we walked all around Piste (not very hard to do), ate breakfast and waited at the bus station for a bus to Valloladid (sp?) With a couple of hours to kill in Valloladid, we walked to a city park where there was a huge cenote with steps down to the water surface a couple of stories down. It was open for swimming had any of us dared, but we opted out. Valloladid was a busy colonial era city with skinny sidewalks and busy streets and it was a reminder to us how relatively young Playa del Carmen is with a well laid out matrix of wide streets and sidewalks.

We caught another bus to Coba and had to hustle to find a hotel room, there just aren't that many in our price range in Coba, maybe 20. Somewhere during the evening I realized we were running out of cash. I had expected to find an ATM in Coba since it is a tourist site, but it turns out it's really for daytrippers so there's no need for an ATM. I put the family on rations and after mostly sufficient food, and necessary bus tickets, we pulled out of Coba on Wednesday with 70 cents in my pocket.

More about Coba: We had wondered why there were so many flies near our breakfast table Wednesday morning but only figured it out after we finished eating. There was a large dump of fresh dog poop about 2 feet behind Jill's chair. Sweet.

The ruins at Coba were in some ways more impressive than Chichen Itza partly because you don't hear much about them and partly because one of the Coba pyramids is the highest pyramid on the whole Yucatan peninsula--and you get to climb to the top! We went counterintuitive and headed straight for the big one first thing in the morning before the hordes of day trippers finished their sightseeing route.

As impressive as the pyramid, were the fleets of bike taxis heading our way full of tourists. Cheap Daddy had opted out of the bike taxi which made the scores of them passing us by that much more interesting.

After eating at another cheap-but-good place with stick walls, no front end and prerequisite old lady, we hung out for an hour or two waiting for the bus. During the wait, while we watched the packed tourist buses go by, we asked the kids what it was like to be the people eating at a shack that the tourists watch as they drive by. We never quite got an answer.

We did get to chat up a bus driver during our wait. His Mercedes Benz tour bus had a pretty sophisticated tire pressure management system that had hoses attached to each tire valve to automatically keep tires inflated in case of puncture. He was a nice young guy with a wife and 2 young kids in Cancun. He makes $15 a day driving a $300,000 bus full of tourists. He gets an extra $10 from the shop owners if he parks the bus at their gift shop.

We also killed some time in a souviner shop and because we were broke there was no pressure to buy anything. Instead, we had a nice time chatting up the shop lady who turned us onto the inside scoop on where all the stuff really comes from (like from a bag of plaster of paris instead of a sacred caven).

We made it back to Playa del Carmen Wednesday around dinner time after watching Wesley Snipes shoot all kinds of people on the little screen.

Time to help Miles with his email.

1-17-06

Paul here typing like a fiend in an internet booth in Playa del Carmen, on a Spanish keyboard to boot. And, the blog directions are all in Spanish as well. Wish me luck.

I put the following chronology in a few days ago, but never got around to posting it. I´ll pick up again at the end of it with some general observations and events and give up on the daily record.

On Thursday, 1-5 we left Tucson in our camper. The Tucson newspaper had a nice picture of an overturned RV that had blocked 3 lanes of I-10 the day before. We didn´t need an accident, nor could we afford the time since we were cutting things pretty close. Regardless, we did manage to stop at Target on our way out of town for a few last minute supplies, like a pair of pants for me! A also managed to dart across 6 lanes of traffic on foot (think ´Frogger´ or a scene from ´Dodgeball´) to get to Walgreens to buy Prunelax, an amazing little pill that crams a prune into a pill. I was an optimist and was hopeful that I´d need them in Mexico. (I´ll keep you guessing whether I need them or not.) (Follow up, my brother had told me they were only available at Walgreens, hence the death defying traffic game. What a surprise to see the shelves at Walmart here in Playa del Carmen loaded with Prunelax!)

At a rest area between Tucson and Phoenix a guy from Bridport, Vermont chatted us up. (Bridport is a podunk town about 40 minutes south of Hinesburg.)

We rolled into Phoenix with time to spare which allowed a quick trip to Borders to buy some Spanish books for the kids, and eventually a hotel near the airport. I dumped Ruth and the kids there and headed off in search of the RV storage/dealership which happened to be across town. Nice folks in an interesting part of town. For instance, a Home Depot is around the corner, as is a place that targets lonely truck drivers. (This is a family oriented blog.)

I caught a ride with an end-of-the day RV employee. Pretty funny dynamics during the ride. He was a local with a radio pre-set to a Spanish rock station, but because I was in his truck he switch to a rock station in English and then cranked the turbo bass under the seat. Besides the fact that my spine was vibrating and my ears were ringing, it wasn´t a bad ride. He dropped me at a bus stop in a west side barrio. There I stood, with my little plastic shopping bag full of last minute things from the camper, looking like the goof that I was, waiting for the bus.

A bus came soon enough, and was full of the typical ´bus mix´ of local people. At one stop, a buff, young, black bike messenger put his bike on the rack and boarded. Overhearing him, he was a born again Christian grandfather, rapper. He was pretty amazing with his rap! He went on for minutes at a time and I was almost ready for a baptism before he got off.

I got off at my stop, with my little plastic bag, and a couple other people who were probably happy their EBT cards were still charged up. I thought, If only they could see me behind the wheel of my Buick!

Needless to say, this last minute planning, who-knows-what´s next kind of travel isn´t for everyone (including Ruth and the kids) but it leads to some great sights.

For the record, the Days Inn near the Phoenix airport is a dive. The broken box spring looked like a bus had landed on it. But they did have a free shuttle that we caught to the airport at 4:30 Friday morning.

One area where we screwed up is that we didn´t plan our luggage needs very well. We didn´t need (or have room for) much in the RV. But we could have used some big bags for the airplane. Instead, we had pieced together some purchases, and showed up at the airport with 11 pieces of small to medium luggage. Ugh!

Easy flight from Phoenix to Dallas Ft. Worth (we´d driven through DFW a week earlier hadn´t we?) with Ruth sitting next to a young man who was trying to detox. He´s got a way to go since he was drinking Jack Daniels at 8 a.m.

Upon arriving in Cancun, we headed for customs with our overflowing bags. In a Mexican airport, you press a button on a traffic signal to see if your bags need to be inspected. Green light means pass with no problem. Red light means get your bags inspected. It´s random. We gave Miles the honor of pushing the button and the poor guy got a Red Light. The poor airport workers too! They saw our load and grimaced. Aferward, upon loading up, Ruth managed to swing a bag smack into Jill´s face like a roundhouse punch. Poor Jill. Welcome to Mexico.

Easy bus ride to Playa del Carmen with a Johnny Depp movie playing on the bus VCR. Our hotel was nice enough but at $60 a night is way beyond a sustainable budget. Playa isn´t that cheap. We are a few blocks away from a super Wal-mart and despite our concerns about globalization, and the fact that we rarely set foot in Wal-mart at home, we´ve hit it a lot. But it´s cheap. 10 litres of water there is 14 pesos ($1.40) whereas 1 litre of water near the hotel is 13 pesos.

I bought my Peace Corps bar of laundry soap and have washed a few things in the room, although there is a laundry service next door that did a much better job of things for just 40 pesos for about a week's worth of laundry. This is not a service with a bunch of old ladies bent over washboards. Instead, it has young, urban hipster women running a bank of washers and dryers and checking their cell phones.

Our first night at the hotel was an endurance test. There was incredibly loud music drifting in our glass-less window vents from some big festival in town. The latin/aerobics mix music wound down at 1 a.m. only to be replaced by another genre until 2:30 or 3. We bought earplugs the next day.

One other First Day story: As we struggled from the bus station to the hotel with all of our bags (only a couple of blocks) we saw a young Mexican man on the street corner shouting, I´ve got Meth! Angel Dust! Ecstasy! Gosh, we declined and decided that the aggressive time share vendors weren´t so bad after all. (Full disclosure, I can´t figure out how to use the quotation marks on this keyboard.)

On Sunday, the beach was full of locals enjoying the day off. This included lots of men in their Sunday finery. Think dressing up for Frontier Days: nice jeans, fancy boots, best cowboy hat, etc. They were sitting on fishing boats drinking beer, listening to local musicians playing accordians and guitars in front of them and enjoying the simple things in life. Add to that picture, the gringo man walking past in his g-string/thong/dental floss bathing suit and you´ve got a pretty good mix of cultures. It was pretty hilarious! (I took the suit off after I got back to the hotel. Just kidding.)

First email check in Mexico revealed a sad surprise. A neighbor from Cheyenne had died of a heart attack at the mild age of 51. Sad, sad, sad. (He outlived his father who had died of a heart attack at 45.) Combine this with the news we heard of a Vermont neighbor battling bladder cancer, and we´re reminded of how fragile life is. Needless to say, I know how lucky we are to be doing what we´re doing.

One more full disclosure: Ruth has never read the blog, and I´ve never read her Dear Public letters. Maybe it´s better that way.

Other observations from Playa del Carmen: The OPC (Off Property Contact) Time Share guys all have their opening lines trying to engage you in conversation. For me, it´s, I like your Tilley Hat! I chatted up one of the guys, and broke the code when I said, You´re OPC right? He was a nice guy, and maybe we´ll help each other out sometime. Otherwise, the slightly aggressive tactics of the barkers remind me of me working a booth or table for ReCycle North, so I don´t fault them much.

Monday was our first day with José, our language instructor. Nice guy who travelled down from Cuernavaca just for the occasion.

OK, enough day by day. In summary, our first week of language instruction was a little less than planned. Jill dug in her heels and didn´t utter a word in José's presence. Miles tried but struggled, and José struggled how to accommodate us. Ruth and I opened up in our own ways and the week wasn´t a complete waste. Ruth needs to see it and read it, I need to hear it and speak it. By week 2, things are much better. More later on that.

Other sites around here: The northerners in their monster motorhomes! Humm, other than the fact that we were all ready to abandon our RV, it clearly wouldn´t have been to hard to drive it down here. Ours is a lot shorter than the 30 and 40 footers people are negotiating around tight corners here.

We also learned how important Jill's decrepid little flip flops are to her when they started to wash away in the ocean. Not to worry, they were recovered, but it was interesting to see what generates a blood curdling scream and what does not.

At Wal-mart we saw a traveller with an Elvis Birthplace-Tupelo, MS T-shirt on and we chatted him up confirming that our decision to drive right on past a few weeks earlier was a good one.

We did start looking for other accommodations and the search process was interesting. José has never been to Playa del Carmen before so he was learning as we were. Even with his spanish, most of the directions we were given were pretty worthless. Eventually, we found a place where we have settled for a few weeks. It´s run by a nice guy from Merida whose brother owns the hotel in addition to being a Doctor in Merida. Gabriel, the manager, is great, and he uses his not-so-great english and we use our not-so-great spanish and have a lot of fun.

At our earlier place, we had a Canadian neighbor lady, Tammy who hopes to save the beach dogs on the Yucatan. The neighborhood stray, Poopy, adopted Tammy for a few nights, and when Tammy moved on, Poopy stayed outside our door looking....poopy. Poopy did not follow us to our new place, though there are plenty of other dogs on the street instead.

Time to get back to "class" (oh, there are the quotation marks, above the 2). More blog in a few days.

(Via email today, my bother´s company plane crashed with all 3 people aboard walking away but destroying the plane. One more reminder to enjoy life, go to the beach, learn some spanish, and get away from the keyboard!)

Cheers!

Paul

1-4-06
Paul here checking in from Tucson, Arizona

We rolled out of Memphis on Monday 12-26 spending very little time in downtown Memphis. We did stop by the National Civil Rights Museum http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org at the site where MLK was shot in 1968. We spent some time outside, and it’s pretty wild to stand staring at the hotel balcony that one has seen repeatedly in pictures.


However, the museum admission was a little steep for a family of four, and our dear children had seen so much of the civil rights sites by then, that we ate lunch in the camper and rolled on. Before pulling out, I did chat up the woman who was protesting outside the museum as she has done for the past 14 years. It turns out she was the last resident of the Lorraine Motel and as I understand it, she is miffed that the area was gentrified and turned into a museum instead of a community social service center. Check out her views at http://www.fulfillthedream.net

From Memphis we headed west toward Little Rock. We picked a mellow road that ran parallel to the interstate and Ruth took the wheel for the first time in the journey. Wow! Did I get a new appreciation for what Ruth had been going through riding in the back of our sardine can! The mellow side road turned out to be one of those crack-sealed nightmares with zebra stripes of asphalt everywhere. The bumping and swaying--and not to mention the noise--riding back behind the rear axle of the camper is gnarly, and Ruth’s ability to survive back there is impressive. The experience of riding back there definitely made me more sensitive to bumps and sways when I got behind the wheel again after just a couple of hours.

Arriving in Little Rock, we did manage a brief stop outside the President Clinton Library which looked pretty impressive, and a drive by Little Rock’s Central High School where the Little Rock Nine integrated the school in 1957 (http://www.centralhigh57.org and http://www.nps.gov/chsc) The high school is still in use and it is HUGE! It was the largest high school in the United States when it was built in 1927. (Miles suggested each student should get a Segway Human Transporter. Never seen a Segway? Check out http://www.segway.com/segway/ Miles and I got to try one out at the RV dealer in Vermont.)

We then found our way to an old Peace Corps friend’s house in Little Rock. Susan and her partner Barry have a great house in the woods and our avid birders. We even got a tour of Susan’s meal worm operation where she cultivates meal worms to feed her feathered friends.

Tuesday 12-27 we headed to Texarkana, Texas. It was windy and rocky in the camper, and as would prove to be the pace in the future, we covered just 140 miles in 4 hours. We settled in an Army Corps of Engineers campground at Wright Patman Lake south of
Texarkana. It was a huge, beautiful lake, and we ended up driving back and forth across the dam oohing and ahhing at the sunset as we tried to find the campground. After dark, I heard something moving around in the leaves near our campsite and we ended ups seeing our first ever armadillo. Very cute.

Wednesday 12-28 we motored on to Mineral Wells, Texas west of Ft. Worth. Ruth met a cool bilingual 2nd grade teacher from Austin in the Ladies room who stroked our egos when she heard what we were doing. Other campground notes: We saw our first raccoon (eating garbage in the dumpster) and we saw a roadrunner as we were pulling out.

West out of Mineral Wells we stuck to US 180 which turned out to be a great road for the next several days. We saw about 1 car every 10 minutes, and other than sun baked—but crack-less—asphalt it was a straight and easy trip. We were driving through big time cotton country and had never seen anything like it. We considered stopping and touching the cotton, but remembered a Vermont coworker’s recent experience with a cotton field. She and her kids stopped to touch cotton in a field down south and ended up with severe rashes. No cause and effect determined, but why take chances.


A noteworthy item on 180 is the frequent “Picnic Areas”. These are wide spots on the road in the middle of nowhere with a picnic table and a piece of galvanized tin on some posts. I can’t imagine any local “picnicking” at them unless their satellite dish broke and they got really bored at home. And, each picnic area was Handicapped Accessible, which was a bit redundant since there was no obstacle within about 10 miles of each picnic table.

We ended up in Lamesa, Texas, and based on some advice at the gas station, we settled in at the town park for the evening. Lamesa provides free RV spots at the park, and by morning, there was another camper there as well. Of some significance: Since the park had no bathroom, we officially started using our toilet. We filled and flushed with the handheld shower and all went well. I took a shower in the tiny camper bathroom, but since our hot water heater had pooped out back in Tupelo, and there was barely room for the coffee pot of hot water, no one else was interested in following my lead.


On to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next day plugging along 180. We ended up at Carlsbad RV Park http://www.carlsbadrvpark.com where, despite being in the high desert with gravel all around, the owners had pulled out the stops to make the place as nice as possible: super clean bathrooms, heated indoor pool, and marshmallows around the communal campfire on a Friday night. I ended up crashing early (I really am an introvert) but Ruth ended up chatting up some liberals around the campfire while the kids played with other kids in the rec room. Ruth’s experience at the campfire was a reminder that we’ve met all kinds of folks at RV parks and that any assumptions or stereotypes about who may be driving down the road in a “rig” are likely to be inaccurate.

One neighbor in the park was a young family (our age, are we still “young”?). Mom was with the Foreign Service and Dad was the homeschool stay-at-home dad. They had been in Austria, but were now in Albuquerque. What did they do when they came home from Austria? Fulfilled a long term dream and bought a 34’ Airstream trailer. (It was a nice trailer!) And just to put RV park diversity in perspective, as we visited with them in their Airstream in the morning, Mom pulled out a bottle of Seventh Generation spray cleaner from under the kitchen sink. (If you don’t understand, Seventh Generation makes environmentally friendly products http://www.seventhgeneration.com that may be more frequently associated with tree hugging liberals than Airstream owners.)

One more RV park thought, from the perspective of being on the road for over a month, we’d prefer to stay in a decent RV park than a state park campground. For around $20, the RV park provides great value, interesting neighbors, and decent amenities. Most have Wi-Fi and cable TV at each hook up (although we have no need for either service) and it’s not hard to find a heated pool as well.

And, Carsbad RV Park came with a very friendly young cat who felt quite at home in our camper.

December 31. We spent the day underground at Carlsbad Caverns.
Lots of Wow! (Or as Jill quotes her little friend, “That’s just whoa!”) We could have headed west from the caverns, but decided to backtrack 30 miles to the RV park in Carlsbad for New Years Eve. While Jill and Ruth swam, Miles and I headed off for supplies.

Once upon a time, my mother wrote from Cheyenne to Ruth and me in Guinea Bissau, “There is a beautiful Harvest Moon over K-mart.” Well, in Carlsbad, New Mexico on New Years Eve, there was a beautiful sunset over Wal-Mart! It was amazing.

For New Years Eve, we watched the movie “Dodgeball” in the community room and had full, brainless, belly laughs all around. Others made it through to midnight festivities, but we bailed out around 10:00.

The wind started blowing hard while we were watching the movie, and it turns out the beautiful sunset was probably a result of howling winds to the west blowing all kinds of things up into the atmosphere.

New Years Day was spent in an epic journey west from Carlsbad in howling head and cross winds. Around the Guadalupe Mountains, we were down to 20 mph and hanging on hard. It wasn’t all that different than sailing in big gusts on Lake Champlain, and there was the accompanying mix of awe, excitement, and concern.


Somewhere in cotton country in Texas our electronic overdrive went out on our automatic transmission. We could hear something buzzing and shorting out and I dismantled the dashboard trying to locate the problem. However, getting rid of the overdrive increased our gas mileage significantly, even in the roiling winds. Eventually, when we rolled into Tucson a few days later, we were up to almost 16 mph. Even if the overdrive heals itself (which it appears to be doing) I’ll probably skip it. It’s pretty amazing the little 4-cylinder gets our crazy rig down the road at all.

Geography lesson for the kids (and us), we drove across Texas, into New Mexico, and back into Texas, before hitting New Mexico again. Look at a map. Texas is big!

We did manage to make it to Deming, New Mexico on New Years Day, and like many others pulling into the RV park, we were fried from battling the wind. How did we know we were in snowbird country? Well, there was a sign at the Men’s Room sink that I thought said “Please do not use Hair Dryers in the restroom.” Nope. It said “Please do not use Hair Dye in the restroom.” Shucks, and just when gray hairs are popping up all over my head.


And further evidence of RV park diversity, despite the signs warning the old timers in the bathroom, we met a nice mom and grown daughter from Michigan. Mom had homeschooled each of her 5 kids at some point or another, and the daughter, who was in her 20’s, had just quit her job before heading off to an Americorps*VISTA position in Helena, Montana. Mom teaches World Literature via the internet and mom and daughter were walking around the park with their laptop open trying to get the best cell signal. The maintenance guy who came by in a golf cart tipped them off that Space 38 got the best reception.

We arrived in Tucson on Monday January 2nd and have been taking care of all sorts of necessary tasks at the Muscat’s (Ruth’s cousin) house. Good email, laundry, and room to sort. Suburban Tucson is very different than Vermont, especially in January. As I type, the swimming pool maintenance guy is outside skimming the pool, and the little glue traps that are all over inside the house aren’t for mice or moles like they would be at home. They’re for scorpions!


It proved harder than expected to find a place to store the RV in Phoenix. I thought there would be plenty of options since the snowbirds were all in town using their rigs. I was way off. The snowbirds drive their own rigs down, and the storage lots are full of local rigs that aren’t allowed to be parked in covenant controlled subdivisions.

Off to Phoenix tomorrow and on to Mexico early Friday morning!