“I think I’m seeing things,” I said to Layne who had already seen all the canyons she needed to see on a Mexican road trip and was trying to nap quietly in the passenger seat letting the magnificent scenery slide by.“I just saw a sign pointing to tequila down the road. That can’t be right.” Layne sat up as I spoke.
“Alcohol?” she said slowly. “On the highway?” She grunted in disbelief.
I put my four way flashers on as you do in Mexico when taken by surprise on the highway and we lurched into a scenic overlook called Mirador Tequila on Highway 15D. There were a lot of references to alcohol around here. This needed investigation, especially as miradors are as rare as hens teeth in this spectacular country.
I should point out we curl up with embarrassment when people naturally ask us, the travelers, what our plans are. Usually that cheerful friendly query is greeted by a long silence, a sucking intake of breath and evasive glances.
“Not really sure…” one of us will mutter sounding like drug dealers trying to account for their time.
It’s not that we don’t want to share our plans; it’s that our plans are made in liquid goo. If they were set in jello they’d be more coherent than our usual style of go and hope. Or go, change our minds and immediately go somewhere different on the spur of the moment. Luckily we live in a van and deciding to sleep in a town previously unknown to us is pretty much our back up plan and not terribly inconvenient. I’d never heard of Cuauhtémoc nor did I know there was a Valero gas station or that they wouldn’t mind at all if we slept there.
It would never have occurred to me I might end up actually sleeping there but sure as eggs is eggs that’s what we did the other night. I blame Google maps for distracting me with possibilities and inducing me to make yet another unplanned stop. The town was very nice if a little noisy. Quite a lot noisy actually but we slept a little bit.
So when I got out at the mirador Rusty took off chasing smells and I went to read the informational billboards talking about alcohol. Tequila it turns out was the subject of the roadside information. Quite the obsession, tequila. Layne turned to me and said we should investigate tequila. Who was I to say no? Another unplanned deviation.
You may be astonished to learn, as was I that tequila is an actual functioning town named for the drink they are very busy producing.
The streets were a cobblestoned squeeze for our portly Promaster van and the Guardia Nacional truck patrols were not hugely enthusiastic about the need to fold all our mirrors so their bristly machine guns might just barely squeeze past my mobile porta potty and fridge without mutually assured destruction. I hadn’t even had a drink and I was threatening to collide with the police.Layne told me to drive to the Sauza factory which houses (tequila) a restaurant of world class quality and which she had set her heart on.
It was a glorious lunch. We should have been rolling into the campground in Tepic at that hour but that plan could wait. I had stuffed peppers and a cold timbal of shrimp in a black sauce and a goat cheese quenelle to demolish before the universe took this magnificent opportunity away from me, as fate is inclined to do occasionally.
Confession time: not all our deviations and planning failures are quite so gloriously successful but every now and again something manages to go spectacularly right. (Tequila). It’s not every day you stumble backwards into a World Heritage Site but we did!
Somewhere deep in the bowels of GANNET2 there hides a fairly expensive bottle of Tequila lying in wait ready to leap out at me when we have a sudden change of plan and something unexpected needs celebration.
It turns out tequila is a superb way to go off the rails and you don’t even need to drink the stuff. Imagine that, I was driving and tequila never became anything more than a word, a promise, an opportunity to muck up one more plan by hint alone. Had I actually drunk tequila I hardly dare wonder what might have got unplanned.
As it was we arrived at Tepic, later than planned of course (Tequila). We are still on time to catch the ferry to Baja which is our next plan. Probably.
