BootsnAll Travel Network



Back to Seattle Weather?

It has been forever since I wrote my last blog entry and that’s good, because Allison is the one who can actually write proper English. Than again, right now I am feeling so miserable, that it is overdue to do some real wining and complaining.
As I write this blog we are all sitting in the Yoda Van in Zihuatanejo (if you’ve seen Shawshank Redemption you’ve heard of this place) with at least 120% humidity. We drove from 8000feet to sea level today. Let me tell you, right now I prefer the altitude! We have about 14 more days left at the coast and I am worried. I don’t know if I can drink liquids faster than I am sweating. Our fridge holds 12 beer cans and since you shouldn’t drink the water here I’ll be dehydrated by lunch time. We’ll have to think of something how to survive this environment. Than again, we have mastered obstacle after obstacle on this trip and I am sure we’ll find a way how to deal with this nasty humidity.
Let me now tell you my perspective of the last 2 weeks in Mexico, at least all I can remember, because we just met two Germans who told us that Tequila helped with severe perspiration. I think it just makes you care less.  Anyways, after a pretty awesome month traveling through the states I thought we were well prepared to conquer Mexico (after all I am German and I thought conquering was in my blood).We even had a very smooth border crossing and I called my dad right after we entered Mexico, while I still had reception with my cell phone. My dad told me how proud he was and that he was bragging to all his friends about his sons travels. Man, if he would have seen us only 5 minutes later, he would have rethought this statement. It only took 5 minutes to get seriously lost in Juarez (and also many other places). Within the 15 minutes I ran 2 red lights (I still do that, but not at the same pace) and I had several people give me looks and say things that didn’t even sound nice to a non Spanish speaker.
If you have ever driven in Mexico you are probably familiar with “Topes” (speed bumps) or sleeping policemen as they are called here. Those things are everywhere and impossible to see and the van takes a severe beating whenever I don’t pay attention to them. There are also a lot of potholes on the road, many so large that little kids could drown in them. All that in addition to the cobblestone roads makes driving here a real adventure. I am so glad that the Yoda Van isn’t just any vehicle, but an incredible piece of 1982 German engineering. We just passed 5000 miles today and except the cv joint which was no problem for the Wolf to replace, we had no problem with the Yoda Van at all.
My dad probably wouldn’t have been so proud if he had seen us being completely clueless where to stay (Allison already wrote about the hotel in Jiménez). One night we even spent 90 bucks to sleep at a Best Western. It took us 3 days of being in this country before we dared ordering real Mexican food from real Mexicans which ended our white bread and cheese slices dinners.
All of that and the fact that we wanted to sleep in a comfortable bed, do laundry, fill the Yoda Van with drinkable water made us look very much forward to visit our friends (Dave and Terri) in Ajijic. We where able to ask them a lot of questions and just relax and do a whole lot of nothing after our not so pleasant first days in Mexico. Dave and Terri have the widest bed I have seen and the four of us would have fit in it easily, but unfortunately they didn’t offer it to us unlike our friends Lynn and Daren in Las Vegas.  I think there is a reason why people in Seattle call him Dave the Prick and I still envy him for this title. We still had a very nice time in Ajijic. We went to the circus, had a lot of good food, we even had a babysitter for one night. Life was good again. We even had 2 good days after we left Ajijic. One in Patzcuaro and one in Uruapan. We lived within our budget and still enjoyed ourselves, but one thing we haven’t had yet so far in Mexico was one full day of sun. All of us started getting a real sun tan for pretty much the first time of our lives. We were only the second palest people at the pool and now it’s all gone. There is no sun in Mexico. Not only is there no sun, we are driving from thunderstorm to tropical rain to thunderstorm. It was fun in the beginning, but now it starts felling just like Seattle again.
It’s 11:23 pm now. Both the kids and Allison are asleep. The humidity
is still extreme and I am out of Tequila. That’s why I have to end it right here.

Two days later:
I had a very good sleep and a bad headache next morning. I thought we had seen the worst of the rain. Not even close. This day we had biblical rainfall. We weren’t really hoping to see the sun anymore, a break with rain was all we wanted. It wasn’t so much that we didn’t want to get wet. We were wet anyways from the humidity. I was more worried about the flooded roads. We asked Allison’s parents for the weather forecast and it didn’t sound too good, so we decided to try our luck in Acapulco. The drive took us 4 hours and for the most part we were driving in 10 inches or more of water (Thanks again Yoda Van. Several roads in Acapulco were closed, but we still made it to the beach and found a hotel (our search for a hotel room in Acapulco could be a blog entry by itself). We had another white bread and cheese dinner and a very good night sleep. The next morning when we woke up the unthinkable happened. The sun was out!



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