Grutas Tolantongo

Don’t ever let anyone tell you two dogs are no more trouble than one dog because that’s just not true especially if one dog is Rusty. We’ve lived with two dogs and we sailed with them through Central America from San Francisco 25 years ago and that wasn’t easy. 

Now we have two dogs for one more week and the prospect is causing us to wake up with panic attacks. “Tule” has become Squirt for his new owner and he is as cute as ever. 

But Andrea can’t take possession of him until next Friday air we are stuck with two dogs for another week and the stress is killing us. Rusty is grumpy as hell and he is letting me know. 

I wish I could explain to him we have but one more week of the undisciplined high energy teenager in our midst but he keeps looking at me as though to ask why I am torturing him.

Squirt is a sweet dog, all 13 pounds of him and he is a quick study considering he was a street dog nine days ago, he’s even learning to walk on a leash more or less, but his curiosity and lack of street sense gives me palpitations. He happily runs into traffic and he broke the harness we bought him last week to try to control him. He needs training and lots of attention and routines that don’t vary. All things his new owner will shower on him at her home in San Miguel de Allende. Meanwhile we are awaiting impatiently for the hand over next Friday. Watching Rusty suffer is no fun at all. Cleaning up small accidents reminds me why I don’t want excitable puppies in my life. 

Frankly we’ve been having a tough time of it. When Andrea wanted Squirt we were delighted and when she wanted to postpone pick up for ten days we were philosophical about the delay but it hasn’t been easy especially watching her dog Sassy get along so well with the dog she calls Squirt. 

We figured we’d take the ten days and enjoy a circular tour of mountain towns we’ve long wanted to visit, San Luis Potosí, Queretaro, and Guanajuato for a start. 

First though we figured we follow some friends who told us of an excellent wild camp near some spectacular pools which they enjoyed with their dog. Lauren posted a video on Instagram of their dogs enjoying a private section of riverfront. Perfect for Squirt and Rusty! 

And the main attraction are famous for their beauty too, the Grutas Tolantongo hot springs. 180 pesos ($10) each to enter and 30 pesos ($2) to park inside. Deal! 

The reason I’m not posting my own pictures are because we got the security guard at the gate who said no dogs allowed anywhere in the park. 

Indeed there was that green sign on the road in which we thought no dogs at the famous pools. Lauren got her two in didn’t she? Well Mexico is the land of the random inexplicable and we fell victim to his mood of the day. It was 90 degrees in the canyon and we faced the sand long drive out we had just taken to get in. 

The pools are in the middle of nowhere and the last few miles are a series of well paved zig zags deep into the blazing hot canyon. 

At first I figured the zigs and zags would be uphill but we down deep.

“Barbacoa” in Mexico doesn’t mean barbecue as you know it. In fact it’s a stew usually of mutton or beef and around here it’s popular. We weren’t in the mood especially in a restaurant cantilevered over the void relying on Mexican building codes to support it. 

With our luck it would collapse during lunch. Our state of mind was bleak as you may surmise. 

“Borrego” means sheep. Or mutton in this case. 

The views driving in and out of the canyon were spectacular however Layne wasn’t in the mood for scenery over a vast drop off. She stayed glued to her seat and let me take the pictures. 

There were turns out and rash cabs and water tanks if your radiator needed a refill. It was very civilized. Except there was no phone signal. 

So we shipped out Starlink, as you do and planned our route out. 

We Google mapped a route to San Luis Potosí a city with several tourist attractions and also guaranteeing a cool mountain climate and off we drove.

Crappy roads and all back to civilization. When we got a phone signal Layne found A campground close to San Luis Potosí attached to a hotel. It sounded promising. Then of course, because this is our luck at the moment the owner of the hotel lost his head when Layne called ahead. The price doubled from that posted online for RVs to $60 a night (!!) we could only use the pool in the morning (?) and dogs had to stay in the van and couldn’t be let out. Thank you very much we declined politely. He sent us a WhatsApp message saying $40 a night and the pool all day but no dogs as though ours had suddenly de- materialized. 

We stopped roadside for lunch not expecting much but what a lovely surprise! “Gorditas” freshly hand made… Gordita literally means “small fat thing” and they were. And delicious too: 

It’s a thick corn tortilla griddled and expertly slit like a pita and then filled with one of her seven different fillings. A buck twenty five each.  Potato and chorizo: 

We hung out and chatted for a while and tasted her tart chili verde with chicken, equally good and we told them of retirement and travel, no children or house to go back to, just us and the dog (Squirt was in the van owing to the proximity of the main road where he had nearly got run down once already). 

The cook on the left laughed in embarrassment when I said I’d like to marry her and sit and read the paper and eat a Gordita every hour she was open, a different flavor each time. Her daughter who runs the store thought it was a great idea but their neighbor on the right said being retired and doing what you want is the best. She’s been retired for four years and knows of which she speaks. 

Well at least lunch was a hit. We had no idea how to spend the next week with Squirt and Rusty but we had to figure something out. With Squirt barely house trained a hotel was out of the question. We fell back on the tried and true, a campground we can liked hang a day away in the city of Pátzcuaro, the serene garden shown at the top of this post. We changed direction. Our luck had to change. 

San Miguel de Allende

Layne posted our problem child on Facebook. A California woman living in San Miguel de Allende about three hours north of our moochdock in Mexico City, contacted Layne saying her little Sassy needed a companion. Would we oblige? 

You bet! We said goodbye to Omar and Angelica after a lovely week at their home and they too had fallen slightly in love with our foundling. 

They too have a jealous dog, just like Rusty so there was no room in their home for little Squirt, the dog we needed to get housed! 

We got on the road and chose the toll route about $25 in all to get to Andrea’s house as soon as possible. 

It was a fast drive on a road where sixty miles an hour was easy to hold, so few potholes were there.

I took one stretch at the fastest I’ve gone in Mexico, 78mph. Usually I tool along around fifty or fifty five worrying about sudden holes or lumps in the way. 

We made good time and we’re at the gated community around lunch time.  I was pretty sure she would love Squirt. I had a talk with him and told him to give it his best shot, things were looking good. He listened. 

Sassy, the fluffy white ball hit it off with sleek strong Squirt, who was five days ago a street dog lost in Mexico. Now he was going to get a home in a gated community with a woman who loves and understands dogs. It was perfect. 

Andrea and Layne hit it off and chatted while Rusty and I went for a walk. The objects of the exercise were oblivious to all but each other. 

There was a problem, Andrea is house sitting a friends dog and can’t take Squirt until June 2nd. So we have ten days to burn touring the mountain communities around San Miguel. We can handle that and knowing he has a loving home makes us happy. Squirt did not want to leave and I had to physically pick him up to take him away from Sassy. Rusty is mad as a wet hen having to share his home with that other dog. Great: ten days of two gloomy dogs. 

Up first we drove the ten miles to the city center and struggled to follow Google maps tortuous route to the campground in the city center. 

It took a lot of circling and figuring to find the unmarked gate to the campground. Almost unmarked.

The park is a dusty space with a few vans still parked long after winter season is over. The manager pointed out dogs must be on a leash which is not usual in Mexico. And with Squirt not familiar with a leash we decided we need to leave after one night. 

San Miguel de Allende is one of the top destinations for foreigners coming to Mexico to visit or to live. It has all the shopping restaurants social gatherings and high prices you can imagine. 

From Wikipedia:

San Miguel de Allende, a colonial-era city in Mexico’s central highlands, is known for its baroque Spanish architecture, thriving arts scene and cultural festivals. In the city’s historic, cobblestoned center lies the neo-Gothic church Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, whose dramatic pink towers rise above the main plaza, El Jardín. The Templo de San Francisco church nearby has an 18th-century churrigueresque facade.

About 150,000 people live in this city set at 6200 feet among the mountains. It was founded in 1541 and named for a Spanish friar Juan de Miguel. Then in the 19th century the name was changed to San Miguel de Allende. Ignacio Allende was born in the city in 1769 and was executed 42 years later as a traitor to Spain as Mexico fought a war for independence. 

It’s typical of Mexico managing to amalgamate two sides of the country’s history into one city  and by means of perfect compromise have them make sense. The Spanish Empire and the Catholic Church face off against anti-church revolutionaries and they manage to name the same city for both of them. 

It was not easy squeezing the Promaster through these steers but it’s a challenge  I enjoy. At 21 feet long sometimes it takes “backing and forthing” to follow Google Map’s blue line, especially when people park too close to the corner. 

On one street I found myself inching past a car stopped in the narrowest section of street and all she had to do was toll forward five feet and all would have been well. I glared down into the parked car and saw the driver busy mixing baby formula  and oblivious to the lack of space. Had we slipped even slightly sideways on the cobbles she’d have got some new racing stripes on her car and then she’d have noticed! I locked the front wheel differential and up we went. 

The campground was closed when we stopped outside and Layne got out to find some one to open the locked gate. Meanwhile a big truck stopped behind me. I had to move on. The circuit through the streets was excessively tight but I made it back and Layne was waiting beside an open door. 

The kid below greeted us in English with a cheery hello and I got her picture such that it reminded me of a classic. 

Henri Cartier Bresson in 1954 caught a French kid marching home with two bottles of wine. I thought I did good! 

Oh and Andrea, Squirt's new Mom gave us a heads up when we mentioned a desire to go shopping at Costco and Walmart in the town of Celaya an hour south of San Miguel de Allende. It appears the narco wars are heating up there in a town known for it’s resident population of Jalisco Nueva Generation cartel. It seems they are in a turf war with the Santa Rosa da Lima cartel and the government’s sending in troops and National Guard to break it up. From what I read eleven people are dead so far. 

We saw military and police columns all along the freeway which corroborated Andrea’s warning. Scary eh? But like I always say you only get caught up in it if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn’t a country of random mass shootings and avoiding the war in Celaya is easy! Don’t go there when you have been warned. 

New Crocs will just have to wait. Drat!