Back in the US of A

We have been home for almost a month. There was a Lucha match advertised in SE Portland, so I was waiting to do my last post after that, but it had been canceled. Alas. I have hope though, that there will be Lucha in our future.

So… this truly is the last post on this blog. (I’m pretty sure.)

Our first full day in the US we had breakfast at Starbucks, lunch at Subway and late afternoon snack at McDonalds. We drove from Tuscon to Carpenteria through 106 degree weather.

It was glorious watching the car thermometer drop as we drove west through L.A. By the time we got to Carpenteria it was in the 70s.

The next day we drove to San Fransisco, spent a day with my brother, and then drove a straight shot home to Portland. We got home on the second and two nights later our neighbors shot off a bunch of fireworks. They must have really missed us.

I was shocked at how little had changed and very quickly wondered if we had really been gone 9 months or just a few weeks. It was so easy to be back.

I’ve gone into a few tiendas lately looking for familiar foods. There was candy from Guanajuato in one and a little tear came to my eye. I’m shy about speaking Spanish still, but enjoy the little bits of conversations I have had with people around the neighborhood and in the tiendas. (and looking for the Lucha last night.)

The best news is:

Butch spends a lot of time outside my window on the porch roof. She is truly a dogonrooftop.

Last Day in Mexico

We’ve been home for a week now (and it was my 45th birthday yesterday,) so I am finally ready to post the last dogsonrooftops posts.

We woke up in Guaymas and I wanted to have one last Mexican Market experience so we went into town to find the market and have breakfast. It already felt very different from cities in the center of the country – more gritty, more of a border town, even though it is about 3 hours from the border.

I bought a last cup of fruit with chili and lime. I decided the tiny stand was just a front for men to stand around drunk. There were three guys there and the one serving the fruit could barely function at 10 in the morning. I began to worry that this would be what made me deathly ill on my last day in Mexico. So I enjoyed it, but with a sense of dread – come to think of it, that is the way I enjoyed much of the street food I ate. And as always it was all perfectly fine and healthy.

Guaymas seems like a cool town, on a harbor and amongst these big mountany rocks, but we were ready to get on with our journey, so didn’t wander or explore. We drove out of town, across more desert,

with more bonding pitstops,

towards the border and the US of A.

Once we got to the border we sat in line for a long while,

with the ubiquitous Mexican commerce going on outside our window.

We got some snacks and I bought an overpriced hammock, even after haggling for the first time since I arrived in Mexico.

The Fence.

We went to the right.

On the way

We are in San Fransisco now – It is cool and breezy. Such a relief after all that hot hotness we just drove through. The car thermometer told us it was 114 degrees driving through Arizona. Driving through LA it dropped by 10 degrees every half hour or so. By the time we got to Carpenteria it was in the mid/low 70s. HEAVEN. It had been about that since then.

I’ll continue the tale of traveling from Guanajuato Wednesday morning:

Butch did not do so well in the car. She threw up and drooled like crazy that first day.

We drove to and through Guadalajara much faster than I had expected and stopped at this sweet roadside place just past the city. They had amazing quesadillas, and a huge coke bottle decor.

We continued west to San Blas, on the coast, through very pretty countryside.

One thing I love about Mexico is the ingenious ways of reusing stuff. This roof of a restaurant is being protected by old movie advertisement banners

San Blas is a sleepy little town. It was hot and humid, we swam in the pool at the hotel and the ocean and they both seemed to be just a bit cooler than the air.

There were tons of lizards around, I saw a huge iguana and two parrots. Mikko caught a couple of toads. It was wildlife heaven – and lots of mosquitoes at sunset.

The next day we drove up the coast to Mazatlan. Since the people in San Blas were so cool with Butch staying there, we figured all Mexican hotels would be OK with dogs, so we found a place in our travel book that looked good and were all paid for and ready to get into our room, until the guy at the front desk saw the dog – and everything went bad. He was great though and called around to try to find a place that would take dogs. To no avail. Finally he said that his bosses were around, but once they left at 7 pm or so, he would let us sneak Butch in, as long as we were out by 7 the next morning.

It worked out well – the hotel was right across from the beach, where there is a public salt water pool, that is just basically a cement wall built in the ocean

Butch and I hung out poolside and then on the beach while the boys frolicked.

The next morning she and I snuck out for an early morning walk along the malecon, which is a broad walkway that runs the length of the beach. There were lots of joggers, dog walkers and rollerbladers. It was already hot and sultry by 7 in the morning.

We had both of our Mazatlan meals at El Shrimp Bucket, which is attached to the hotel. Here Mikko is having his latest culinary invention: bacon and watermelon.

We took of the next day for Guaymas, which is another coastal town, though we missed the coast.

There were a few emergency father son bonding pitstops.

We stayed in a motel on the outskirts of town, where it was easier to sneak Butch in – because our car was parked right outside the door of room. It was a little fancier than the hotel in San Blas and the water was a little cooler.

More soon…