April 30 – Flagstaff, Arizona

Well, we're back in the USA after hauling ourselves from Cuernavaca to Cabo San Lucas to Flagstaff in just 2 weeks. Not a lot of time or locations along the way to catch up on the blog, so here's a bunch:

Starting where I left off after 1 week of classes in Cuernavaca:

We spent a weekend in Acapulco and Taxco. We shot down to Acapulco on a Friday afternoon after class. A straight, fast "autopista" makes Acapulco very accessible from all points north including Cuernavaca and Mexico City. The Friday we chose was the last day of school for all of Mexico before a 2 week Semana Santa vacation period with Easter Sunday in the middle of the vacation. As such, Acapulco was going to be crazy, and we had been warned to hit it on the first Friday night of the vacation period instead of waiting until the second weekend.

I hadn't been in Acapulco since 1979, and Ruth and the kids, never. Acapulco: Think Coney Island on a hot summer weekend. With its easy access to Mexico City, everyone shows up! The city of Acapulco itself is a huge commercial/industrial place lacking any of the small scale or charm of the Mexican Riveria that included Playa del Carmen. Acapulco even has a 2 mile long tunnel through the mountains so the city can sprawl past its natural boundaries.

But we did watch the cliff divers, and saw the hotel I stayed in 17 years ago. El Mirador is perched just above the cliff divers, and we must have had a package deal as a student group once upon a time, because this time it was priced way beyond our frugal 6-months-on-the-road budget. Instead, we found a funky little place in the heart of "Old Acapulco" run by a little old lady who loves to decorate with plastic flowers.

It was Palm Sunday weekend, and on Friday night there were numerous people sleeping on the street in the zocalo. They appeared to be folks from the countryside with bags of palm leaves, that they subsequently wove into amazing little shapes and sold to passersby over the next two days. It wasn't lost on us to see the sleeping families on the sidewalk within a stones throw of the luxury yachts on the water.
Saturday morning we ate breakfast at Woolworth's, and reconnected our trip back to the Civil Rights component back in December.

We touched the ocean, but otherwise didn't need to stay very long. Because of the volume of vacationers however, we couldn't get our first choice for a bus to Taxco and had to kill a few extra hours in an Acapulco city park. Miles and Jill got their 15 minutes worth of fun on a giant inflatable slide, about 15 feet tall. Noteworthy: One of the locals tending the slide was reading "El Retorno de Dorian Gray" por Oscar Wilde. You just never know where cultures will combine.

It was also easy to see the illuminated sign for "Neuroticos Anonimos". I had seen a few branches (from the outside) of this organization by now in various cities.

We spent Saturday night in Taxco. Taxco is a dense-packed mountainside town with tranny-busting city "streets" and Hitchcock-ian passageways. Fortunately, we only had our little backpacks for the weekend since it was countless steps down a rabbit hole to find the guest house. And of course, with such close quarters, the sounds that drifted in the window all night included: a night club band playing speed metal guitar riffs; the obligatory cat in heat; the sounds of noses being blown; and the smell of toilet candy.

A sidetrack about toilet candy (at least that’s what I call it): Since Mexican building standards don't require standard traps in drains, or appropriate vents on sewer lines, toilet paper doesn't go down toilets very well, if at all, and stench comes up very well. To address this, toilet paper goes in a waste basket, a rubber stopper goes over the shower drain to keep the smell down, and a courteous housekeeper hangs a naptha bomb prominently in the bathroom. Maybe you still find these odd devices hanging in a urinal in an old bus station in the states, but otherwise, there's a reason most of us don't hang these nostril burning, eye watering devices in our bathrooms. Harumph!

Sunday morning was Palm Sunday, which meant by the time we hiked up the stairs to the main plaza, or zocalo, the place was humming! Eventually a huge parade snaked in from the outskirts with a figure of Christ carried aloft and thousands of intricately woven palms being waved.

We had fun in the silver market but eventually had to catch a bus back to Cuernavaca. We finally experienced consistent, family friendly movies on the bus on this weekend trip. On the way down, we saw "The Notebook" which is a dialog-heavy love story about an elderly couple trying to reminisce. It was a bit of a milestone for us, because rather than depending on blood and guts for context clues, it was just a boatload of speaking in Spanish. I'm pleased to say that I understood about 90% and a sliding scale was applied to the rest of the family.

Monday back at school meant new teachers for Miles, Ruth and me. Despite my earlier thoughts that Miles was hanging in there with his grown up classmates, a weekend of decompressing revealed that it was really too much for the poor kid. Things didn't look any better on Monday when classes were reassembled and new teachers were assigned. Miles's new teacher started off with the Present Perfective tense, a tense I had just reviewed the previous week. The topic eft Miles and his adult classmates in the dust and we decided it was time to assert ourselves. We got Miles a private teacher for the rest of the week. We also learned that prior to Tuesday’s private instruction, one of Miles's new classmates on Monday "worked in a table tennis club".

Here's the story: At class break on Monday, our beloved 9 year old son, who had a few stray doodle marks on his knees and an occasional ink spot on his cheek and forehead, told us that Deborah from Austria worked in a table tennis club. It was only the next evening, at an "intercambio" session where locals come to practice English and students practice their Spanish, that I learned from Deborah herself that she does not work in a table tennis club but is instead a Table Dancer. (And within minutes of sharing that fact with our small intercambio group a young Mexican man got so distracted and orny-hay that I excused myself and went and played Memory with Miles, Jill and a local kid.)

Deborah was a nice enough young lady who was learning Spanish so she could Table Dance in a Mexico City club. On a field trip later in the week, we learned that her parents and siblings in Austria won't have anything to do with her and she never wants to return. Instead, she wants to find a rich man and never work again. I personally would have advised her to spend money on orthodontia instead of a plane ticket and a G string. And now, to add to our children's cornucopia of experiences, Miles and Jill know words and phrases like "Table Dance" (Miles wants to know why the tables don't break) and "Golddigger" and have been brought up to speed on Anna Nicole Smith's legal struggles.

On the family homestay front: Our host family was nice enough, but there was a financial aspect to the arrangement that couldn't be ignored. At $66 a night, it was our most expensive accommodations in Mexico. But for nearly $800, I got a little miffed when we were told there was no more toilet paper for the night, or that they had run out of drinking water for the morning.

And there's a whole 'nuther story about me finally screwing up the courage (and the vocabulary) to say "Look, the full-sized bed that Ruth and I are sleeping in is SHOT! It has a broken spring ripping the sheets and jabbing me in the ass, and the mattress folds like a taco!" I basically got, "Don't worry, it's not your fault" for a reply.

With the busy language class schedule, we finally found time to take a tour of Cuernavaca on a double-decker bus. As was the case in Puebla, passengers on the open top deck, needed to mind their heads so they didn't get snagged in the low hanging power lines or left behind on a low tree branch.

This tour drove past a few historically significant places, like Cortez's castle, but otherwise it had a Hollywood Home of the Stars aspect that was completely lost on us since we didn't have a clue to who the famous people were whose monster houses we drove by. Our tour guide was an aspiring Henrique Youngman and there was even a B-grade celebrity "plant" on board who came forward to sing, read poetry and sell his CD’s. At least one couple from Veracruz was impressed enough to buy a disc, but I think most of the people on board didn't have a clue to who he was, and we were the only non Mexicans on board. The tour was more Branson, Missouri than Cuernavaca, Mexico.

We did make an afternoon trip to Tepotzlan, which despite it's ranking as the mythical birthplace of the god Quetzelcuatol(sp?), and spectacular mountain scenery, felt more like the outlet shopping centers in North Conway, New Hampshire. The place was packed with well heeled Mexican tourists from Mexico City.

An odd piece of information: One of our spanish teachers, and the uncle of our homestay hostess, were both shooting victims (who survived). The uncle got ambushed driving on a country road near his house and I forget the whacky details of what happened to our teacher. But it was a reminder that crazy things happen to people and that in Mexico, the guilty parties might never get caught. We also read disturbing news stories about the drug violence up near the U.S. border, and how if cops are shot and killed, the local assumption is that the cops must have been up to no good. Such thinking keeps crimes from being solved or even reported in the media since journalists are at risk as well. Needless to say, we stayed far south of such mayhem.

Back to language school: Our teachers were great. One was an old hippie who had lived in various big cities in the U.S. in the 70's and still wore his corduroy bell bottoms to prove it. Another was an older social activist who is writing a book about all the times he's been tortured in police custody. He has led some very successful fights against the powers that be and has made a lot of enemies along the way. Both were expert grammarians and very good teachers.

I "impressed" Ruth and the kids by ordering Cow Tail Soup one night in a restaurant in Cuernavaca. It was pretty darn tasty!

After 2 weeks in Cuernavaca, we moved on to Mexico City for 3 nights. It was Easter weekend and because Mexicans take their Semana Santa vacations very seriously, Mexico City was about as empty and peaceful as it could be considering it is either the first or second largest city in the world. (No one has been able to get an accurate head count lately.)

Mexico City was a special treat because we got to meet my second cousin John for the first time. John's grandfather and my grandmother were siblings, but somehow growing up in Wyoming I never met John's family in Texas. Good fortune for us, John happened to work at a Quaker Guest House in Mexico City and set us up in a gorgeous apartment at the guest house for a very reasonable price. The home used to belong to one of Mexico's famous muralists, Jose Clemente Orozco, and the apartment could have been at home as a cottage in the Adirondacks with hardwood floors, tongue and groove ceiling, etc.

We also met a lot of great people at the guest house and were impressed by the immediate comradery among the various travelers who crossed paths there including a few different folks at various stages of round the world tours

On Saturday, we tootled around downtown Mexico City including taking a trip to the top of the Latin American Tower, Mexico City's version of the Empire State Building. One of the few copies of Rodin's "The Thinker" was on temporary dispay in the courtyard.

Mexico City's Zocolo was a bustling place for Easter weekend, and was a perfect sample of Mexico's complex mix of cultures. On the huge temporary stage a Christian Rock band was belting out contemporary Christian songs in Spanish. At the same time, a few steps away indian dancers were dancing their dances, while in another direction an indian healer was cedaring (my guess) people who wanted to have their spirits cleaned (my guess as well).

We also got the full dose of the big city as we tried to make our way down a market-clogged street behind the Zocalo. Ruth tried to cross at an intersection, and as most normal people would do, she tried to use the sidewalk upon arriving on the other side of the street. Well, some market hag had her stuff laid out on the sidewalk and grabbed Ruth by the arm and refused to let her pass. It was B.S. and I was fried, but the odds were against us if we made a scene. It was odd, because within minutes, blocks upon blocks of market folks were trying to haul their stuff off the sidewalks because word must have come through that the police were on their way. Moments later, the rumor must have passed, because blocks upon blocks of market folks were busy reassembling their stalls.

On Saturday night, we went to see "Judas". This is a local tradition where an effigy of Judas is blown up. Except in the version we were invited to witness, two competing families of firework/paper mache craftsmen create a variety of effigies and blow the living daylights out of them. Ruth was leery, especially when our local tour guide from the States refused to bring her 9-year old daughter because it was too dangerous. But I insisted on experiencing such a unique event. Sure enough, the neighbors had made some amazing paper mache figures of famous Mexican politicians (and I suspect George Bush as well), but they were loaded with such fire power I never got close enough to take notes. After about a half hour, wiser heads prevailed, and our family headed out to return to the guest house. Little did I know that to get to the metro station we walked through a neighborhood that our earlier tour guide, who was a social worker in prisons, wouldn't walk through after dark. We made it to the metro without event.

At a late dinner in a restaurant that evening, we got to watch our first (and only) batch of "Lucha Libre" (professional wrestling) on TV. It had all the drama of professional wrestling in the States, plus the added bonus that about half of the contenders wear full masks over their heads. Whacky stuff that is incredibly popular in Mexico. Since we don't tune in to wrestling in the states, the kids had never seen anything like it, and as sometimes happens, Miles tried to take an intellectual approach to the whole escapade. I tried to tell him that sometimes it's better not to think.

Sunday was Miles's 10th birthday. The lucky kid, birthday # 9 was in England. At breakfast at the guest house, we met a very nice guy, Isaac, from Brattleboro, Vermont who is friends with a guy we know in Hinesburg. Isaac is a student in Spain, but was on a spring break trip to Mexico to hang out with his boyfriend who is a Mexican figure skater (who knew?).

We then headed off to Chapultepec Park where we rented a pedal boat and hung out with a couple hundred thousand Mexicans.
Ruth and Jill reached their limit when Miles and I decided we wanted to take a bus tour of the city, so we split up for the afternoon. Pretty cool that Miles and Paul went their own way in Mexico City for the afternoon and Ruth and Jill went theirs. We each had to find our way around on the subway. Mexico City's subway fare is a whopping 2 pesos (currently worth a little less than 20 cents). We all survived and reconvened for a potluck dinner at the Guest House. (Miles admits that he'd kind of like to have a normal birthday party in Vermont for his 11th.)

Monday we headed north to San Miguel de Allende for the evening. SMdeA is gringo land, and although I'm glad we can say we saw it, I won't be in a hurry to return. Notes from there: I'm sick of the Bee Gees (Mexican tourist haunts play the bejeezus out of the Bee Gees), and we got directions from a German shopkeeper who Miles decided looked like Garth in Wayne's World.

The next day we headed on to Guanajuato, a funky town crammed against the side of a mountain so tight that the downtown has numerous tunnels for both cars and people. And, like Taxco, we had to walk down a bunch, and up a bunch, of narrow passage ways to find our accommodations. But unlike Taxco, where we only had day packs, we had our 4 months worth of suitcases. What a pain.

The next day we journeyed on to Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city. We were expecting an industrial slum, but were pleasantly surprised by a nice, relatively clean and calm, city with lots of charm and culture. We ended up spending 3 nights there, in part because Ruth's guts fell out and she needed an extra day to put them back in place. We did make it to the famous Thursday market in nearby Tonala where an unbelievable amount of ceramics, metal work, and glassware was on sale. It was the source for much of the stuff we had seen throughout Mexico. We bought some very cool stuff, but stopped short (just barely) from buying a bathroom sink. (Unfortunately, I didn't pack things well enough, and two of our prized ceramic pieces were toast when we unzipped the suitcases in Flagstaff.) We also watched a circus parade go by in Tonala, complete with lions, giraffes, etc.

Another random building code complaint: What's up with no shower curtains at various places in Mexico?! At best, you soak most of the bathroom while showering, and at worst, as in Puebla, a bunch of the shower water lands on the live electrical outlet next to the bathroom sink. And no, I never saw a GFI protected outlet in Mexico.

We caught a bus in Guadalajara for Mazatlan. Our bus had a final destination of Agua Prieta, 29 hours north on the Arizona border. "Fortunately" our trip to Mazatlan was only 8 1/2 hours. On that bus trip we watched our first ever Britney Spears feature film. Britney makes a road trip. Yikes! Let it be said, that the whole family needs to detox from the media after seeing so much of it in Mexico. Who would have guessed that would be our major health concern after 4 months in Mexico. Somewhere on that bus trip we were stopped at a check point and Ruth and Jill got to look out the window to see one of our bags get searched. Surprise! What did the inspectors find? Miles and Jill's Teddy Bears.

And when we arrived in Mazatlan, after 8 1/2 hours on a bus, surprise for us! It was Bike Week! Think Sturgeous, Laconia, Daytona, etc. Scads and scads of motorcycles running up and down the road doing their best to get attention, complete with the young Mexcian lady riding topless on the back of a bike. Wow! we were a long way from the highlands of Chiapas.

Because of unreliable information about the ferry from Mazatlan to Baja California, we spent 2 nights in Mazatlan. Aside from the motorcycle craziness, I actually liked Mazatlan. It came in way above the expectations I had as a crazy spring break resort. It had a great old town and mellow sized hotels where we stayed. I'm sure there is a glitzy/foofy side farther north in the fancy zone, but we never made it that far.

On Monday afternoon we began our 18-hour ferry journey.
We had met some travellers earlier who spoke of a nearly empty ferry. Perhaps because it was now the first day after vacation that the ferry was available, our boat was anything but empty. We joined 450 other people on board, and considered the extra $25 we spent for a private cabin to be a wise investment. The seas were relatively calm and we had some wonderful moments including watching the gulls fly along with us as we left Mazatlan; catching the sunset after a dinner of rice and beans; and being given a tour of the pilot house by the crew. We learned that the crew works 5 months straight, going back and forth on the 18 hour trip, and then take a month off. Our tour guide, who was some sort of ship's officer was from Veracruz on the other side of the country. He keeps a 16' Hobie Cat there and we shared Hobie stories. We also chatted a fair amount with some Mayan Palace OPC's (Off Property Contacts) and they reinforced our belief that for the most part, the Mexicans working the front line of the time share scene are pretty nice folks, despite the fact that some of the most amoral people on earth work in the back offices.

Breakfast on the ferry looked a lot like a disguised dinner from the night before, but the fact that they could feed 450 people and themselves was impressive enough.

From the ferry dock in La Paz, we caught a 4 hour bus down to Cabo San Lucas, and that's where my head started to spin. I knew something was up when the taxi driver in Cabo gave me change in US dollars. I hadn't seen them in 4 months, and I didn't even know there is a new $10 bill out there. Cabo is beautiful, and is the home of the famous Lands End arch. But it's very expensive and full of Americans spending money like nobody's business. We had planned on finishing the trip in a decent beach side resort after 4 months of everything but. The reality check regarding prices however was a mind blower. We were finally advised by a nice hotel clerk to go to the internet and get a deal on hotels.com or an equivalent, rather than being charged the rack rate at the front door. We followed his advice and ended up at the most expensive internet cafe we'd used in Mexico and eventually booked a 2 nights at a fancy place.

And then the big news came. In the process of retrieving our confirmation from our yahoo account, we found plenty of new messages (we hadn't checked email in about 4 days) telling us that my brother Bruce, his wife Cindy, daughter Betsy, and son-in-law Tom had all been bombed in Egypt. Whoa! They were alive, but preliminary reports were pretty grim. Plenty of shrapnel wounds, broken bones, need for skin grafts, etc. Very heavy news at anytime, but a real head trip as we checked in to our deluxe accommodations for two nights. Sitting poolside the next day, the Jackie Collins novels, meaningless conversations about home decorating ideas, and the woman who looked like the mom from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" taking pictures of her grown daughter (and a wee bit big and fat) posing seductively in a bathing suit, all were part of a weird back drop as I thought of loved ones writhing in Egyptian hospital beds.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4653291,00.html/ or
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2006/04/26/news/casper/49a76efbbbcd2f788725715c0007c17d.txt/

The Egyptian story is way bigger than this blog, but it includes bedside visits from the First Lady of Egypt, Mrs. Mubarek, eventual flights to Germany for military medical care (though my family are civilians) and I believe an imminent transfer to Denver because there really isn't much room in Germany after a record body count in Iraq for the month of April.

Later in the day, Miles and I rented a waverunner (Jet ski) and hauled ass on the ocean and got thoroughly soaked while Ruth counselled a homeless Mexican on the beach who tried to kill his wife in Phoenix after he had caught her with another man. Kudos to Ruth's Spanish skills for bringing the man to tears and promising to get the counseling he needs so he can go be a decent father to his 3 kids in Phoenix.

Thursday saw us flying out of San Jose del Cabo. A small accomplishment: We had let our 30 day tourist visas expire in early February after seeing how much paperwork was involved to extend them. As such, we were a little concerned how things were going to proceed as we left the country. But we looked like every other sun baked tourist heading home to the USA and made it out without a problem.

By Friday morning, Miles and I were on the city bus in Phoenix with all of the crazies (I bet at least one of them had tried to kill his wife after catching her with another man) and found our way to the RV storage lot next to the table dancing club in the NW corner of town. The rig started after being parked for 4 months, we threw some newly acquired Mexican hits in the CD player, got lost trying to get back to pick up Ruth and Jill at the hotel (I've never made so many U-turns in an RV in such a short amount of time), and eventually headed north to Flagstaff. The 6,000 foot climb from Phoenix to Flag was a slow one in our little 4 banger, but we survived.

We spent today sorting things out, preparing things for shipping, cleaning up "the rig", enjoying the company of family, and celebrating the speed at which loved ones are being shipped home to the United States.

The month of May lies before us and we head west toward L.A. tomorrow before heading north toward Vancouver before turning east toward Vermont.

We're very fortunate to be on such a great trip and to have made it this far in good shape.