El Mirador de Álamos

Layne snipped at me this morning when I was abed and she was up and being a busy human doing. 

“You haven’t posted anything today?” Her voice was dripping with indignation as she prepared a tray of tomatillos for toasting. I was reading  Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana a wryly amusing travel diary from the Great Silk Road in 1933. Laynes indictment reminded me I was being a lazy diarist myself.  

We have been busy enough visiting the town of Álamos making up for the brief sideswipe we awarded the town in January. However Monday is our last day here and after ten days of no forward motion the GANNET2 expedition is slowing down. Laziness is seeping into our daily routines. The systems are working, the ranch operates around us and rumors of rain next week make the rounds. Meanwhile the days stay above 100 degrees and the skies are blue. 

We got our days muddled up (again) and went into town Saturday to check out the market which takes place on Sunday. So we drove up to the overlook called El Mirador and under a grilling sun we looked out over the city. 

The cathedral built in 1786. From up above the city looks tiny but from street level where you thread your Promaster van with inches to spare the Warren of streets feels endless. 

The church was packed on Saturday and closed weekdays. They say it’s quite impressively decorated inside. I’ll give it a look when we’re back in December. 

We also saw the campground from the mirador high above the city. It’s under the line of tall palms on the edge of the wilderness.

And then we saw the cemetery next to Rancho Acosta. 

It all looks like a toy setting from up on the hill. And like Key West from ground level!  Or at least a certain similarity.

There was a man at the mirador and he was wrapping a bottle with string. We fell into conversation as he practiced his English and we expanded his vocabulary. “I wish my English was better,” he said exhibiting a very good command of the most universal and difficult of languages.

Beniamino explained he was wrapping a bottle for a particular type of local tequila, Bacanora traditionally kept in string wrapped bottles.

He made friends with Rusty giving him a glass of water and we chatted in the shade of the mirador. He’s a firefighter in town and talked about the difficulty of getting the government to find first responders. We had some subjects in common and talked as he wrapped the bottle. It was a pleasant moment in a burning hot place. I put some food out for the resident frightened dog and we drove down the hill. It’s not a long way up but it has great views. 

The road up to the lookout is a pain, made as it is of cobbles which require walking pace or losing your teeth to the shaking. 

There are steps up but we only pretended Layne walked them. In winter it would be pleasant no doubt but with the car temperature gauge showing 114 degrees and Accuweather showing 94 ( take your pick) on Layne’s phone it was just too hot to play silly buggers. 

Back at town level, 1600 feet (485 meters) above sea level we decided to take refuge from the heat and across the plaza from the cathedral we ducked into the history museum, Museo Costumbrista to check on the history of this town. Rusty slept in the van under the air conditioning which runs off the battery bank. 

The history of this town is one of those stories of discovery, colonization by the Spanish and from there Álamos became a center of mining and education creating a disaffected Mexican ruling class that  fomented revolt against Spain. 

You can imagine the slow slide into irrelevance when highways and railways bypassed the beautiful colonial architecture creating a back water tucked into the mountains. 

It turns out Alamos is the northernmost colonial city in Mexico, nowadays just six hours driving from the US border at Nogales. Once discovered by gringos tourism flourished and if you drive through Sonora anyone who knows will recommend you visit Álamos. Mexicans too come here in droves. There may not be any mining anymore. 

There is tourism. And the museum stresses preservation of nature aimed at younger visitors.  And then rooms displaying life in the 19th century. 

We bought a small balsa wood souvenir that fits aboard GANNET2.

Rusty joined us outside and we went to lunch. I shall miss Rusty’s freedom when we return to the US next week. 

I had huevos rancheros while Layne had chilaquiles, fried tortilla chips in a tart tomatillo sauce in this case with shredded chicken on top:

We eat outdoors from preference and out of continuing Covid precautions and to share our space with our very relaxed dog. 

Life in Mexico for Rusty! 

Life At Rancho Acosta

We have slipped into stillness and that means nothing much happens at Rancho Acosta from day to day. We get up late and listen to the ranch hands doing their chores, gathering hay bales, moving hoses, servicing the water pumps. 

The ranch is a dust bowl and every day I look skywards to see what the prospects are. A few wispy clouds have put in an appearance over the inland hills, the promise of the beginning of the rainy season. The owner of the place told us, and he speaks fluent English as needed, it’s been a drought situation for the past twenty years. Normal rainfall amounts are good for that year’s needs  but enough water never falls to restore reservoir levels of decades ago. He looked mournful and told us it’s the new normal, “no matter the cause of climate change…” the old water levels aren’t coming back. 

It’s dusty and dry as we wait for rain. Most days the afternoon high is over 100 degrees and we have GANNET2 buttoned up, with the window shades in place and the 15 amp shore power plug connected to the van. It’s a cool cave inside and it’s lucky we like our 70 square foot space as we don’t find it claustrophobic. 

Overnight it cools down to seventy degrees so mornings are very pleasant sitting out on our cement pad listening to the mourning doves while we drink caffeine (Yorkshire Gold tea for me and coffee for Layne).

The mornings we spend with the doors open and I start the active part of the day taking the time to walk Rusty. He gets out of the van as soon as one of us wakes to the sound of his insistent yawns and as soon as we slide the side door open he goes out and checks the scene. I follow as soon as I am properly awake. Layne makes hot drinks and gets the morning exercise video ready. 

If the water is on we can take showers but the bathroom block doesn’t have a water tank so on alternating days the water is off to help stretch the drought situation. Most people have storage tanks on their roof so the municipal water being turned off hurts the very poor. Some days Layne cooks in the cool of the morning. 

We’ve had good luck ordering food by delivery (Spanish required!) including an excellent Mexican pizza with refried beans(!) that gave it an oddly pleasant creamy consistency. 

We got some really good bacon cheeseburgers delivered. Sometimes a taste of home is pleasant and watching a downloaded movie while eating a burger in air conditioning takes you off the road quite nicely for an evening. Then we had classic Mexican fish, Layne’s was grilled and mine was fried. 

I have to remind myself we’ve been here more than a week already and thus are quite domesticated. Indeed we’ve never stopped this long in one place. We have plenty of time before our absolute last permitted date in Mexico, June 27th but this pause is a chance to rest. We’ve driven ten thousand miles or more this winter and when we get back to the US we are going to be on the road going places. Here we pay $15 a night and have all facilities and all to ourselves. It’s a privileged spot to rest and enjoy reminiscing about all we have seen this winter. 

After lunch when the day heats up we retreat to “our” shaded loungers by the pool with earbuds  where the WiFi signal lets us listen to music or watch videos between dips. The van is buttoned up after lunch with the rooftop a/c keeping the interior bearable for when we return. I also scored a major victory on the shore power front when I fixed a battery overcharging problem.  

I discovered after much thought and consulting with my engineer friend Bruce in his RV in Arizona that the float setting of the battery charger was set too high. Lithium batteries don’t use the float setting so before I reduced it the shore power was driving the voltage too high for the batteries and shutting down the 110 volt system.

Our shore power plug doesn’t operate anything, it simply uses the 110 volts to charge the 600 amp battery bank. The inverter runs the 110 volt appliances and the 12 volt system inside the van.  Repair work underway in Florida: 

The new electrician at Custom Coach in  DeLand added a muffin fan and moved the 3000 watt inverter for improved ventilation when we were in Florida but the overcharging glitch remained after a few hours plugged in. I’m rather proud of my  self for figuring out the problem and changing the settings by  myself (with Bruce cheering me on) and reducing charging pressure on the batteries. So now we can plug in anytime we need to stop for more than one night in any overly hot place. For one night we can run the air off the batteries but then we have to drive to recharge them as the solar panels can’t keep up with the power draw of overnight air  conditioning. 

As you can see it’s not exciting stuff living in a campground. Two hours this morning bring a house cleaner vacuuming, sweeping and scrubbing the floor with a water and vinegar mixture. I brushed Rusty as he enjoyed getting his rug thinned out in this heat. I gave him and the campground dog a cookie and as it’s a water day I took a cold shower. It’s just too hot to use the hot water…

Last weekend a group of youngsters showed up and we shared an evening in the pool talking about Mexico their lives in distant Tepic and our travels. While there a young man showed up to meet his cousin from out of town. Imagine our surprise when we knew him! 

On our January visit young Nestor saw us lost in his city and showed us the way to the park above the city where we took Rusty for a walk. And here he was at the pool after he spent a very hot day showing his cousin and her friends around the hills on quad bikes. It was a bit odd being in Álamos and knowing someone…a small world. 

No doubt this weekend we don’t be alone at Rancho Acosta and as treaty one Suburban with four youngsters onboard have arrived at the hotel and doubtless there will be more. 

Layne has met them already and says they are very nice. I’m sure she’s right but really, what a disgraceful intrusion on our privacy! We will soldier on of course and plan to leave on Tuesday so we have a few more days to mooch around the place. Some swimming some reading some chores and early to bed for a solid eight hours.  A tropical storm toying with the Keys, a hundred days of war in Ukraine and Covid persisting across the United States.  Boring Rancho Acosta seems a very nice place right now.  

Soon we will have to move, back to familiar places but the exploration phase of this journey is done. Sitting still is actually quite pleasant when you have some accomplishments to look back on. 

Night Maneuvers

There was a horse neighing madly two nights ago. It sounded agonizing. Layne somehow figured out how to sleep through the row but I was sitting outside in our luxurious recliner reading “Barbarian Days” a surfing memoir, of all things captivating, by William Finnegan. The horse prompted me to investigate its apparently dire condition. 

Rancho Acosta is a working farm  tucked away out of sight behind the luxury pool and fifty dollar hotel rooms. Rusty likes wandering the campgrounds we stay in as they don’t tend to hide street dog ambushes, consequently he and I have walked and stumbled most of the paths through the abandoned projects in the back of the walled compound that protects us from the world outside. 

It was eleven o’clock at night and Finnegan was still enjoying surfing Australia when I shut the Kindle app on my iPhone and lumbered to my feet to go sort out the damned neighing horse. I imagined it might be stuck or something similar, trapped in barbed wire or threatened by raccoons or some other impending disaster. What I would do when I found it was unclear but I assumed my initiative would come to the rescue of myself and the horse. 

I stumbled back through the debris in the dark campground picking my way and listening to the ever present horse still clearly in distress on the other side of the wall and I wasn’t going to be able to do anything for it  from inside the campground.

I had to accept the need for a good long trudge up to the campground  entrance  and then turn left  on the street to go past the cemetery and then find the bloody horse down below the hill somewhere. The driveway  in question  seen in daylight: 

Headlamps make me feel like a suburban idiot pretending to be a coal miner so I was not in a great mood as I stumped up the endless drive in the dark with the beam from my headlamp jerking around at the slightest movement from my head. 

With my headlamp jerking around wildly I tried to keep an eye on where I was stepping. In daylight the road past Rancho Acosta, hidden by scrubby bushes is just dusty dirt. At night the cemetery wall throws added darkness and every rock is a potential ankle twister. Luckily I don’t believe in ghosts or that dread would have put paid to the entire expedition by requiring me to turn back before I encountered the nameless horrors of the cemetery’s undead. 

Rusty hung back a bit, watching as  I went out into the unknown, then he followed me closely and eventually passed me, trotting ahead as I strode downhill to look for the horse in distress. Apparently no one else in hearing gave a damn or had superhuman sleeping abilities (like Layne back aboard GANNET2) because the frantic neighing continued at ear shattering intervals and no one else was moved to help the animal. 

The cemetery (“Pantheon” in Mexico) looked lovely and evocative like the Key West above ground cemetery of fond memory. Rusty rooted around as I stopped at the locked gate to snag a couple of pictures. No evil spirits made themselves known (as usual; they never appear for me). Lacking scary stories to hold me back I could hear the horse continuing to call out and I still felt obliged to continue my quixotic quest for its relief. Had I seen a ghost I’d have turned back most likely, but no such luck. 

It wasn’t hard to figure out where the horse was. Rusty was having no part of this phase of the walk and wandered off into the night preferring not to commune with animals ten times his size. The horse was lurking almost out of headlamp range and was fine of course, lonely all by itself in a huge field. It trotted off calmly when it saw me and that was a piece of luck as otherwise I’d have had to do battle with a barbed wire fence and I’ve been rather hard on my shirts this trip. I have three slightly darned ones left after various encounters with dogs thorns and fence posts…and had I been forced to get into the field with the horse I’d probably be down to two torn up shirts by now. 

The walk back seemed rather long and dreary, a lesson in minding my own business, as the neighing continued only slightly abated, but at least I knew the creature was okay. The campground dog found her courage and appeared back at GANNET2 in time for refreshments, a cookie for the dogs and water for me accompanied by Layne’s symphony of heavy breathing in B flat major and the staccato brass of the lonely horse all by itself in the field. 

Which is why in a more compassionate world you will see at least a goat happily grazing next to a contented, silent horse. Horses like company and apparently this one did not like being left alone all night. Especially next to that cemetery full of who knows what that might have been lurking within?

Clearing For Customs

We’re sitting in the pool at Rancho Acosta, on the outskirts of Álamos, Sonora.On a 99 degree day it feels a lot cooler than 112 degrees. 

“We need to figure out what day we’re going back to the States” Layne says out of the blue. 

“Why?” is the only thing I can say. Most of this five month trip we’ve been operating by-guess-and-by-God, making it up as we go along. Now suddenly it’s time to make a hard core plan. We’ll never stick to it, is all I can think. 

“We need to get the van ready to cross back to the US.”  Let’s face it: Layne the former lawyer is usually right on matters of financing, socializing, planning, cooking and stocking the Promaster with food. Indeed our whole retirement madness to drive around at random as houseless nomads is based on the plan she hatched in 2016. 

That comment in the pool was why we suddenly found ourselves emptying lockers, throwing out crap we hadn’t used since we left Key West October 25th last year. 

“A flour sifter?” I protested. 

“We’ll I might need it. You said it was a good idea,” the master planner  riposted. 

“I said it was a good idea on the boat when we were miles from a bakery and carried fifty pounds of flour,” I replied. I used to pride myself at being a pretty decent baker under way back in the era of paper recipes and metric conversions worked out in a long private mumble multiplying cups by ounces and converted by dividing the result by 28 to get grams. Or something like that. I let my phone do the work now. But we don’t bake in the van. There’s no room and Mexicans have become demon bread bakers in the last twenty years. They even make great pizzas. 

I put the flour sifter reverently next to the trash can. The following day a campground employee snagged it with great joy when I told him we didn’t want it. Next I got on my knees at the back of the van and put the official Florida tag on the door. We had been using a homemade tag ordered on Etsy to look identical to our official tag. Except it has no registration sticker. The idea was if it gets stolen we carry a few unofficial spares in the safe onboard. Saves dealing with the Florida DMV if we find ourselves in a distant land with a stolen tag. 

I’m not excited about going home. There’s the good stuff, friends and elaborate meals and a nostalgic go around checking places off my list of not yet seen wonders. But I like Mexico. I like being on the road. I get a thrill in the morning when we settle in for a few hours driving to places unknown to me. I love being a nomad. I love buying food at roadside stands, of learning to figure out currencies and customs. I love being treated like an adult in countries where your health and safety are protected by your common sense not by lawsuits and warning stickers. I love driving in Mexico where the most important rule is use your four way flashers if you’re going to do something idiotic. I’m dreading going back to the land of aggressive passing and instant road rage. Layne says I’m much happier than ever I was when we sailed from San Francisco to Key West nearly a quarter century ago. She says even when we end up doing unplanned stupid stuff like getting stuck in the sand or being  forced to back up a track because of a dead end, that’s when  I’m having the most fun. I guess I’m more a van lifer than a sailor. 

One thing both have in common is getting ready for customs inspections. We used to anchor out of sight before approaching the port of entry. We’d do just as we’re doing with GANNET2 getting the van ready for inspection by removing things that annoy customs inspectors like fresh food and alcohol and stuff. 

The date of said border crossing? Well, we are pretty certain it will be at Naco a tiny border post no one knows about. 

But the day? Gosh, that’s a tough one. We’re shooting for the fifteenth but anything could happen to delay us so we have some breathing room as our papers require us to leave by the 27th. “We don’t have time to go back and hit Morelia one more time do we?” The planner in chief looked at me in that way she has when I want to buy some extra coconut cakes from the vendor at the speed bump on the highway.  

No of course we can’t revisit Michoacán or Oaxaca or Veracruz or Chiapas. But I am assured we’ll get lunch at the Bisbee Breakfast Club with Bruce and Celia  when we finally do take the plunge. I’m easily bribed. Arizona here we come.Eventually. 

Panama 1999. Miki G and crew.