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
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
posted by The Lambersons at 4:20 PM
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