Time to say adios to 'Troupey' our faithful Isuzu Trooper SUV

WATKINS GLEN, New York, USA - When our Toyota Tundra pickup arrived in the driveway two weeks ago (with us inside), our 1997 Isuzu Trooper probably knew its days were numbered.

With the Tundra home from Mexico, the Trooper will now be sold to someone else out looking for  adventure, we hope.

It certainly provided us with plenty.

We bought the Trooper - nicknamed Troupey - the same fall that we dragged the original Gray Goose Express traveler trailer from Pat and Sanders Lamont's house in Sacramento, through California and Arizona and down all the way to Tenacatita Bay.

Eventually, the Gray Goose Express was parked in Arroyo Seco, where it was temporary housing for Laura McCartney while she was teaching English to the village children.

Troupey served as a great go-to-the-beach vehicle as well as a family loaner. A lot of people borrowed the SUV, frequently using its 4-wheel drive function in the soft sands of Arroyo Seco.

Last summer we used Troupey a lot here at Seneca Lake, managing in the fall to get it stuck up to its axles trying to retrieve the sailing vessel Crimson Tide. Eric Hazlitt came by and pulled the entire rig from the soft sand and gravel at Fitch Beach in Valois in that episode.

Troupey will be missed, but the Tundra will take its place quite handily as the primary tow vehicle here in New York, for the various watercraft already in our fleet, and perhaps for one new one - a Windrider 17 sailboat if I can find a good deal.

Trooper and Grey Goose at Jim Carr's house in Arizona where we had to dump nearly 1,000 pounds

A trip to a wine bar where the belly dancers rule

PORT ANGELES, Washington, USA - Adm. Fox, Dustin and I headed downtown to Port Angeles tonight to a place called Wine on the Water (LINK: Wine bar) where we tried a few wines and listened to music.

Note the ladder to the left

Quite a cool evening

It wasn't the usual wine bar fare when it came to tunes - though at first there was some pop-fusion something that was giving me more of a headache than the sulfites in the vino.

The music that eventually dominated came from the adjacent room where a group of four belly dancers were putting on a show.

And the room was packed with their fans while they went through a series of quite provocative moves. (A brief video is below.)

Tomorrow our travels will take us to Canada... Still looking for my passport, though.

A town called Squim... even though it's spelled Sequim

SEQUIM, Washington, USA - Adm. Fox and I have been making far too many jokes about some of the local names around here - this town's handle for example: Sequim.

Not much rain, but the river runs fast

Even though it would seem that it would be pronounced See-Quim, it is pronounced simply Squim, like Squish but with an M at the end instead of ish.

So when you leave from here to go to the downtown you go.... Squimming, of course.

Name aside, this is a fabulous place and has only about 17 inches of precipitation per year. That's practically desert, especially for the northwest.

A half-hour's drive way, on the other side of the mountains an average 170 inches of wet stuff is the norm.

I'll stick to squimming in Sequim.

We've been taking great walks here on a trail, seeing lots of wildlife. You don't have to go far however as the deer come into the yard every night, snacking on both the bushes and any birdseed I have been foolish enough to leave out.

The nursery said the deer don't eat this bushes

Adm. Fox also made a new friend today who really wanted to get out of her enclosure and continue the walk with us.

I have a bag of lettuce to give her on our next pass by.

Another recruit for Zumba?

Our time here visiting son Dustin is almost over and we are charting a course home to New York.

We have a few more adventures planned before that, including a sojourn to Canada Saturday - Victoria, Canada to be exact, an hour-and-a-half ferry ride across the straight.

We will join up with Bahia del Sol amiga Shania who has graciously agreed to squire us around the city.

Now if I can just find my passport...

Starting to like the gray skies and light rain... Uh-oh!

PORT TOWNSEND, Washington - The gray overcast here has starting growing on me a little, kind of like the green moss I see on almost every rock and on one side of the trees.

Kee-rist, I see it's growing on the back of me, too!

Today Adm. Fox and I took a sojourn to the east to visit former CSUS colleague Paul Cahill and his wife Tamar at their five-acre estate a mile or so from downtown Port Townsend. Paul says it's a work in progress. I don't know. It looked like a fabulous place to me.

Port Townsend waterfront

And I don't know anyone else who keeps llamas in their front yard.

Port Townsend in a relatively short drive from where Dustin lives and another waterfront town. It seems to have resisted all of the big-box stores and retained a lot of charm. We bought food at a Thai restaurant, then retired to bar called the Pourhouse on the waterfront to eat it along with some excellent pale ale and cider.

Excellent!

Tomorrow we will explore Port Angeles itself and pay a courtesy call on the Peninsula Daily News newspaper (LINK: Daily News website), an 18,000 circulation publication that seems to have a good reputation with the locals here.

Port Angeles downtown

What's up with that?

No plans yet for our sojourn back to Watkins Glen and Seneca Lake... Still waiting for the all clear from the weather folks. And I just read that it snowed in Central NY. today.

What's up with that, too? 

New blogging software for iPad... let's see

SEQUIM, Washington, USA - Just a little too lazy to pull out one of the two laptops I have along, so I decided to install some new iPad software for blogging with blogspot.com.

This, as you can see, is a test to see how well it works.

If it does, well, fabulous. If it doesn't, well, just another bit of evidence in support of my recent purchase of a MacBook Air.

Now, let's see if a photo can be added.

On to The Honest Travelers

SEQUIM, WA. - Adm. fox and I launched a new website several weeks ago, calle The Honest Travelers and are using it as a test site during our cross country sojourn...

We will do some cross posting, for sure, but look for our travels at this website: http://thehonesttravelers.blogspot.com/




Gas stop on the way to Port Angeles

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Back in the good old USSA with more sojourns planned

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Two days back in the USSA and I think I am finally rested enough to write something coherent.

You get to be the judge.

Pool and view from our condo

After Adm. Fox left Mexico in a cloud of dust (quite literally) driving from Puerto Vallarta to Sacramento, I stayed behind, wrote a little but mostly closed up the condo at Bahia del Sol, said goodbye to, well, so many Canadians that I wonder if anyone stays there in the winter.

Adm. Fox's trip went smoothly, with a stop in San Diego before landing here at Dr. Pam and Steve's house where I joined her two days ago. My flights were good, all luggage is accounted for and now civilization is being enjoyed.

You can drink water from the tap! Eat lettuce without soaking it in a disinfecting solution! And the wine not only is drinkable, it's inexpensive. At least the wine I buy and drink.

Rinse before eating, but nothing else

I do miss the sound of the ocean, replaced here by the distant thrum of the freeway. And I miss our Spanish lessons with arguably the best Spanish teacher from whom I have ever taken a class. But it's on to new adventures, including a trip to the Northwest then across the Rockies and back to New York sometime in mid-April.

Before that, I have to finish up the writing on my book The Fracking War and - perhaps equally important - find a camper or camper shell for our newly painted Toyota Tundra to make our expedition more fun.

We had the Tundra painted before Adm. Fox headed north. There were more than a few dings and scrapes from living in the village and some small truck vs. car mishaps. I will miss the cost of Mexican repairs. The body work, repainting and bumper straightening cost $546 U.S.

Time to start checking Craigslist for that camper... like the one shown below...

Looking for this kind of camper...

Tonga talk and parachute jumping all in one afternoon

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Adm. Fox and I gave a talk/slide/video presentation Friday at the Vallarta Yacht Club to a group of folks about to sail across the Pacific Ocean to the South Seas.

They are self-named "Puddle Jumpers" a pretty understated sobriquet, considering they might be at sea for 30 days jumping the Pacific puddle.

Video of the pie eating (throwing!) contest

Still, there was lot of excitement in the group, as they watched our show about our visit to Tonga last September.

We went to Tonga - Vava'u specifically - to watch, photograph, video and participate in the 4th Regatta Vava'u, a week-long celebration of sailing, culture and Tonga itself. We had a great time - much of it already described in earlier blogs. But reliving it Friday has us already scheming how to get back for Regatta Vava'u V this fall.

A Regatta Vava'u shirt from Tropical Tease

The islands sold themselves easily to this group of cruisers, many of whom only know for sure they are leaving in a week or two. When they get to the South Pacific, they have a vast number of places - and a vast ocean to explore. But it sounded like at least a half-dozen boat captains are leaning towards a Tonga stopover. And one young woman - a registered nurse - said she was interested in maybe spending six months there.

At the end of our hour-long talk, we gave away a number of items from Tropical Tease, a clothing shop on the main drag in Neiafu. Owner Cindy Russell makes arguably the finest T-shirts and other clothing I have ever bought and worn. Her Tonga Dirt Shirts are famous here in Vallarta among the cruisers.

At the end of this blog is a video we produced this fall, parts of which are in the videos we showed the cruisers.

There's Daddy!!!!!

Photography can be dangerous

After the presentation, we scurried over to the beach at Nuevo Vallarta in front of the Hard Rock Cafe where a group called SkyDiveMex has been doing parachuting jumping all week, often taking tandem rides with some of my amigos here at Bahia del Sol.

We watched some of the folks jump a little before sunset. A second group never got jump - it just got too dark.

But just as the last few jumpers were coming down, one of them collided with a photographer on staff with the group. He took his bloodied head in stride, even grinning for Adm. Fox's camera as he left the landing site.

 Below is a video of that crash.

Here's a trailer for Regatta Vava'u IV - the movie...

Hitching a ride on Richard Branson's SpaceShipOne

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - I have had a great run in the news-journalism-writing business, starting at the Napa Register newspaper in Napa, Calif. and now with the Finger Lakes Times in Geneva, New York.

In Napa, I was hired just as I graduated from college and spent a summer writing obituaries, chasing firetrucks and generally dealing with all the stories that the veteran reporters didn't want to touch. With the daily Finger Lakes Times, I write a once-a-week column on the topic of my choice. The freedom to do that is awesome.

In between these two bracketing media experiences, I worked at six newspapers in a variety of editing/writing capacities, almost always with fun people. Fun or not, they were always interesting. Thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and few other social media outfits, I have reconnected with many of those fun/interesting people.

Just yesterday, after I posted a story about entrepreneur Richard Branson, a former colleague told me about the time her husband - also a journalist -  had interviewed Branson. She was kind enough to send along this photo.

The fellow interviewing Branson is Dave Koenig, who, along with his wife Darlene Bryant, worked with me at the Chico Enterprise-Record back in 1981. Gawd that was a long time ago. I came in as news editor, Dave was a reporter and I was lucky enough to get Darlene to move from reporting to copy editing. She was an excellent copy editor.

My experience at that newspaper - because the publisher was, to put it kindly, a difficult man - wasn't all that good, except for interacting with people like Dave and Darlene.

How difficult was that publisher? Well, my first day on the job, before I had even met the staff of about 25 people, he gave me the names of five people he wanted me to fire - that day. I declined, saying I needed time to evaluate everybody before any action was taken. I am still surprised to this day I kept my job for the five months that I did before I joined the faculty at Chico State University.

But, all that nostalgia aside, my big question for Dave Koenig is this:

Can he get me a complimentary ride on Branson's Virgin Galactic SpaceShipOne? I don't get seasick anymore. Promise!

A concert on the Nuevo Vallarta beach - with Latin rock star Juanes

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Practically every flat surface around Nuevo Vallarta and Puerto Vallarta was plastered with a poster contained the mug of Juanes, a Latin rock star who brings in fans from all over wherever he plays. This is a holiday weekend in Mexico and his concert was part of the celebrations.

Juanes - related to Antonio Banderas?

Juanes a huge star around the world, with his Unplugged tour getting five Grammy nominations. Our amiga Laura McCartney caught his act in Madrid. Yes, the Madrid, as in Madrid, Spain.

But back to the beach here.

The concert was held in an open area next to the Hardrock Hotel (yes, it's a hotel). It was supposed to start at 8 p.m. But, being Mexico, the crowd didn't even get very restive until about 9:30 p.m. when Juanes jumped up on stage and started a rockin' show.

The security guards said they expected a paid attendance of about 5,000. It was hard for Adm. Sylvia Fox and I to get a good look at the crowd. We attended the concert sitting on the beach side (read: Free) where we were joined by about a hundred gringos and vacationing Mexicanos.

And we had our own huge Jumbotron right in front of us. (Huge Jumbotron? Is that an oxymoron?)

Here's a link to Road Trip Zumba in which Sylvia talks about Juanes and the concert. She had a great time at the concert, even doing a few Zumba steps as she listened.

LINK: ROAD TRIP ZUMBA

At one point the staff who run the beach area where we were squatting came by and starting asking people if we were staying with them - generally being kind of obnoxious. After he hassled a couple of people (me included), a hired security guard (with a .45 caliber automatic on his hip) chatted with the staff fellow and he disappeared back into the building.

It was reminiscent of our days in San Diego when we would go by dinghy to Humphrey's By the Bay and listen to the concerts there. We heard the Righteous Brothers, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins - even Joan Baez, among others.

Here's a short video of some of the concert - from the beach perspective:

'The Lotus Eaters' helps relive- not relieve - the Vietnam War

SAIGON, Vietnam - The Vietnam War has been the subject of many books - fiction and non-fiction - and remains an often-sensitive a political topic in America. I know because I have read about a dozen Vietnam books, including Frances FitzGerald's excellent Fire in the Lake. And I get into Vietnam debates, still.

In my generation - those of us who hit draft age right at the height of the war in the mid 1960s - we are divided between those who served in the military and those who did not. For the record, I had a draft deferment while in college, then in 1968, I dropped out and for about a year was prime-grade draft material with a 1A classification.

I was never called, though I have many amigos who were.

Tatjana Soli's The Lotus Eaters floods back memories from that time. The book is a combination documentary-drama-romance-potboiler that follows a woman photographer's personal and geographic journeys across Vietnam. The main character works as a journalist, so naturally my interest was piqued from the opening paragraphs. I stayed glued to it.

The book took Soli 10 years to write. Ten years! It makes my self-imposed book-writing deadline of April 1 seem pathetic. But the book's smacks of authenticity and research.

Tatjana Soli

I haven't had the heart to start her second book yet - The Forgetting Tree. The person who recommended The Lotus Eaters to me said The Forgetting Tree doesn't show the same genius.

Then there is also the issue of whenever I read a book as powerful as The Lotus Eaters, I have to ponder what it means for some time before I can pick up another tome.

This is not a light book for the beach. But I suspect most people who read it will come away changed, whether they served in Vietnam or not, whether they were a journalist or not, or whether they have been in love.

Or not.

Banderas Bay whale-watching tops 11 on a 10-point scale

PUNTA DE MITA, Nayarit, Mexico - A quick Sunday whale watching expedition out of this village on the northwest tip of Banderas Bay brought out the inner child in four of us Sunday.

Adm. Sylvia Fox, amigos Marc and Marci and I hired a panga (an open boat) to take us out to check on the whale action just offshore from a restaurant called El Dorado.

The whales put on a show for two hours, so much of a show that I filled my Flip video to capacity. Sylvia probably shot 800 still photos - some of them National Geographic worthy, I am sure.

As many times as we go out and do this, we never seem to get tired of it.

We capped the morning's boat ride with a lunch (and snooze) at a restaurant called the El Dorado where the fish and shrimp were great.

And the Pacifico cerveza wasn't too bad either.

One of Adm. Fox's 800-plus photos

Below is a short video of the whale jumping, whale-tail thumping, gringos screaming action out on the panga.

On the trail of whales and dolphins in Banderas Bay, Mexico

BAHIA DE BANDERAS, Nayarit, Mexico - Admiral Sylvia Fox, Pam DiTomasso and I boarded an outboard-motor-equipped panga this morning at 8 a.m. (Yes, I got up early enough for an 8 a.m. boat trip - hold the comments, please.)

We've done many whale-watching voyages in Banderas Bay, usually aboard a sailboat. We have never been disappointed.

But I was a little skeptical of how much fun it would be, given that in September we were actually swimming in the water with leviathans like these in the Kingdom of Tonga, in the Vava'u Island group.

But a boat ride is never to be turned down. So we went. And, yes, except for my getting a sunburned nose, it was great... Really great.

Think we got close enough?

The captain of our panga, a 28-year-old Mexican fellow named Mario, was fabulous at finding the whales and keeping us close enough for photos but not so close we violated any Mexican rules.

Yes, there are rules about this stuff in Mexico.

Sylvia shot nearly 500 photos

Capt. Mario was a fount of good information. When we spotted the normally placid whales swimming and diving like college students on spring break, he explained that there were as many 10 male whales trying to, um shall-we-say date(?) a female humpback.

On the water, above the water, under the water, love makes the world go around. Si?

He also found us a large pod of dolphins which we stayed with for nearly an hour.

Sylvia used her new (well, it was new when we went to Tonga) Canon camera today, shooting nearly 500 shots in a rapid fire setting. I shot a measly 300 photos with my trusty Canon Powershot 560.

Between us though, we got some great stuff.

Posted below are some of the other photos I pulled from my 300. She will no doubt post some of hers later.

Hmm. 300. What a great name for a movie!

Which way did she go?

Bottoms up!

On the move

Pam and Sylvia

Time away from the beach to view the film 'Lincoln'

BAHIA del Sol, Nayarit, Mexico - Adm. Fox and I checked out the sunset last night and then watched the Spielberg film Lincoln that has been nominated for so many awards you might expect it to show up on a Catholic list of those under consideration for canonization.

Lincoln surveys a battlefield

Most of the feedback we received from people who had seen it was that it was pretty slow, ponderous in fact, and in a couple of cases, people didn't finish it.

It is not exactly a James Lee Burke potboiler.

Still, the movie has good points and focuses as much as passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as Abraham Lincoln himself. It's quite a story.

The politics of getting the amendment passed swirl through the movie. And as a long-time observer of American politics, it was fascinating for me to see the politics at work in the 1860s. They were almost as ugly as today. And the politicians were not a great deal smarter.

Lincoln, was clever, of course. And Lincoln had ethics. Ok, there is a stark difference between then and now.

Tommy Lee Jones

Brooding on the movie later, I realized one reason I couldn't take my eyes of it was because the politics in it reminded me of the byzantine inner workings of the university where I taught for 25 years. We nearly had our own civil war there when the university president shifted funds from academics to public relations - then said he had done no such thing.

What I would have done for a General Ulysses S. Grant!

The performance by Daniel Day-Lewis was Oscar worthy. So was a lesser role by Tommy Lee Jones.

In fact Tommy Lee Jones' character really gets the last word(s) in the movie. It's worth watching until the last minute to see him sans his dark wig and you quickly understand why he felt so strongly about abolishing slavery.

Lincoln is worth struggling through.

Daniel Day-Lewis (center) as Lincoln

Quinceañera in Arroyo Seco Thursday and we bring the cerveza

ARROYO SECO, Jalisco, Mexico - The quinceañera Thursday of our amiga Brianda (the daughter of our friends and neighbors Chena and Chon) has been a much-anticipated event for the last year.

For Mexicans, this party is a combination debutante ball and birthday party with a lot of trappings that Americans are more used to seeing at very expensive weddings.

And in our village, everybody pitches in, helping with preparations or simply paying for things. Someone lined up the band(s), a video person, a photographer, and arranged for food preparation, cleaning the town square and - of course - purchasing enough beer for a party in a village of 300 people.

Yes, 300 people. Many of them are children, but still. Watch for Corona stock to soar later this week.

Adm. Fox and I got tapped to bring down the cerveza, perhaps a comment on how much alcohol I usually bring and/or consume when in town. But it means we will be stopping at Costco Wednesday on our way south to load up. There are times when having a one-ton Toyota Tundra pickup really has its advantages.

Christmas tourists flooding the beaches

Besides being the bearers of beer, Adm. Fox and I have been enjoying the beach each day, going down mid-afternoon, often staying until sunset. With Christmas two days away, our beach is suddenly full of vacationistas, many of them from inland Mexico. Lots of gringos, too, with pale white skin one day, lobster-like appearances the next. Ouch.

Regardless, they all love the beach. And the sound of all the children splashing and laughing is great.

We heard the sound of granddaughter Sasha laughing a lot today. We met her at the mall with her mother for a two-hour visit. Between bites of pizza and scoops of ice cream, she and Sylvia did origami and played with toys, including a giraffe hand puppet.

For the record, the pizza was consumed by Sasha, not Sylvia or me. (Damn it looked good though...) But yes, the ice cream was shared by all.

Here's a brief video of our close encounter with granddaughter Sasha. She has learned a piece of Spanglish that we now use in place of goodbye when we leave - Hasta Pasta... Watch for it.

A happy start with a new Mayan calendar and new epoch

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - We had a scare yesterday as the new day began on Tonga.

We lost the Internet here in Mexico - and thus our electronic link with our amigos there. If the doomsday predictions were right, the apocalypse would be heading our way, hitting Tonga first.



Tonga, you see, is the first place on earth to see the new day, tucked just over the International Dateline. It is already Dec. 22 there and Tongans are out at the Tongan malls doing their Christmas shopping, busy buying shirts in XXXXXXXXL sizes and other gifts.

OK, they're not shopping at malls (there really aren't any) and Christmas is a religious holiday, not a secular-buy-more-today fiesta like the U.S. (and increasingly Mexico). And even Tongans aren't that big.

Here in Nuevo Vallarta the dawn broke beautifully and it is another day of writing (this counts towards that) boogie boarding and, well, that's all I have planned for today.

Adm. Fox already taught her Zumba class which drew close to 30 people today, all shaking it on the beach right in front of the Bahia del Sol condos where we live this winter.

And we just had breakfast at Moon and the Stars Cafe in the Paradise Mall (where the Internet is still working)
.
Not half bad as they say in Minnesota. Not half bad.

The cartoon below has been making the rounds of Facebook and other places. And as it references tequila, it is particularly significant to those of us south of the border.

Happy Dec. 21, y'all.




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Beach music and Star Trek technology all mixed up

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Sunday was one of those days that mixed the old with the new in the kind of weird juxtapositions we take for granted in 2012.

Adm. Fox and I took a trip to La Cruz de Huanacaxtle where we went to the market to pick up a few items that are hard to get around here: fresh eggplant, homemade pickles and fabulous fruits.

There are also booths selling jewelery, hats, clothing and dozens of other handmade items.

Adm. Fox checks out some exquisite hand-made glass

Comfort food for gringos... not many takers

The market has a requirement that any items sold there must be handmade - merchants can't go to Wal-Mart and load up on crap to sell.

Because of that, all the art stuff, clothing and food is great - if occasionally a little pricey.

We wisely ate a big breakfast before we went. The various booths selling pastas, sandwiches, fresh vegetable stir fries, and some concoction simply labeled Arabian Food all looked and smelled delicious.

That afternoon we were treated to a short concert on the beach played by a quartet of Huichol Indians. The Huichols are natives of Mexico and produce excellent beaded artwork (some of which was for sale at the La Cruz market).

But I have never run into Huichol musicians before. An amiga from Canada caught the whole affair on her camera and passed along this video.

After this musical interlude, we walked to our condo (100 yards away) for a Skype date with daughter Anne and granddaughters Sami and Kami in Sacramento.

We had a great, clear connection and it was fabulous (as always) to be able to chat over thousands of miles and be able to actually see everyone. We were attired in our beach wear. The girls had sweaters even inside the house.

We only tortured them for a few moments with live video of the surf breaking and of our pool, right below the window. I can hear passport applications being filled out even now.

Here's a short video of that conversation. Very Star Trek.

A motorcycle and busy oceanside daze in Nuevo Vallarta

NUEVO VALLARTA, Nayarit, Mexico - Admiral Fox and I have been keeping our usual chaotic schedules but last night took time to go to show at the Vallarta Yacht Club put on by a Vallarta-based performer named Kassiano.

What a character this guy is.

He pulled people out of the audience to sing with him, belted out tunes from Sinatra to the latest music and by the end of his show, had virtually everyone in the room on their feet dancing. As you might suspect, we were right in the thick of things.

Rockin' with Kassiano at the Vallarta Yacht Club

On a break from dancing

We were the guests of Bob and Karen O'Hara who helped make the arrangements to bring Kassiano to the yacht club for a special performance.

When Bob and Karen saw him at a theater in downtown Vallarta, he had his full band with him. Last night it was he, a musician amiga and a guy running a sound board. They sounded like a whole orchestra to me.

At one point the dancing he had the crowd jumping up into the air. I don't know the condition of the knees of the other people dancing, but mine are sore today from the impact on tile floor.

Outside of dancing parties, our days here have settled into a sort-of routine. It's sort of, because if something interesting suddenly pops up, well, there goes the routine.

For Sylvia, Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday's at 8 a.m. she's on the beach right in front of our condo (Bahia del Sol) teaching a Zumba class. Today she added a Tuesday-Thursday conversational Spanish class.

For me, I do my dancing on the computer keys, writing for a few hours (or more) while she is out and about. Or I keep writing until my brain overheats. That happened last week - twice. Or was it three times?

Afternoons we usually hit the beach where the boogie boarding and swimming has been awesome.

On the way to the store

The new additions to our vehicle fleet are getting lots of use, too.

We brought up our bicycles from Arroyo Seco and after some serious wrassling with the Mexican Department of Motor Vehicles, got our Honda motor scooter licensed. Now it's the favored vehicle for all errands, particular for Adm. Fox.

And by the way, there is a helmet law in Mexico. I am not kidding. In a nation where you can legally drive around with an open container of beer in your car, you have to wear a helmet.

Dios mio.

Yelapa, Nuevo Vallarta and Sayulita - on the road again

SAYULITA, Nayarit, Mexico - Adm. Fox and I took a sojourn up the highway to the beautiful surfing village of Sayulita today. Last February, when we were there with Mike and Karen Schamel of Hector, NY, the streets were all torn up and the place was, well, a fookin' mess. (Pardon my Irish.)

Today the village streets are all back together and because it is very early in the season, relatively quiet. The streets are not any wider though and the Toyota Tundra almost acts like a snowplow in spots, pushing everything out of its way.

The beach, as always, was fabulous.

Sayulita beach

On the way home we stopped by our storage unit where the day before, Adm. Fox and our new amiga Shania had stopped to put a few things into the locker.

Scorpions beware

They were greeted by a granddaddy-sized scorpion, which they dispatched rather quickly, according to their account of the encounter.

But today Adm. Fox told the front desk people about the critter who had taken up residence (and been evicted) and before you can say scorpion in Spanish (alacran), they were sending over an exterminator to give the place the once over with poison.

He waded in with a tank on his back and started blasting away like Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie.

I'm pretty sure the unit will be alacran free in no time. But to be safe, I plan on staying out of the place for the next few weeks at least.

We had a few other adventures this past week, including catching a power boat ride on Banderas Bay with Elizabeth and Doug.

We went south to Yelapa and then ran along the coast coming back, spotting lots of wildlife, including a whale, dolphins and some wildly colored fish that came to the surface when we tossed out some bread.

We also stopped by the fuel dock to fill up on our way back to Paradise Village. I was reminded why my only power boat these days has a 35 hp Mercury outboard that sips gasoline nearly as slow as a teetotaler imbibes beer at a frat party.

Here's some photos from that round-the-bay expedition:

Yelapa waterfront

More sourdough bread please...

 

 

 

 

 

Las Animas beach and restaurants