Roaming Rileys

After our adventure through immigration and customs in Mexico City, we loaded up the luggage and hopped into our giant white SUV. Our traveling companions (we’ll call them Alan and Eve to protect their identities 🙂 ) proceeded to drive us to Alan’s home in Puebla.

As the ride began, I was struck by the poverty surrounding the airport and the greater Mexico City area. This was certainly a cultural shock and disturbed my middle class New England sensibilities of cleanliness and affluence. I was initially saddened and angry thinking that the world was an unfair place. I could see first hand how both the Mexican government and America with its imperialistic NAFTA policies had been impoverishing millions of people for decades. We don’t see this side of Mexico on television though at home. All imagery of Mexico today involves beautiful beach resorts and sensational coverage of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. We never get to see the poverty which lies at the root of these sensationalized images. After having seen this first hand, I completely understood why someone would walk a thousand miles and risk their life and family fortune to cross the desert into the United States to work for less than minimum wage. This led to the sad realization that despite what some of our news channels in the US would have us believe, these illegal immigrants are not criminals, its the American businesses and both countries governments that are creating the problems.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far thank you, and I apologize for the political rant. I feel much better now though.

We reached Puebla in around two hours after a drive through the mountains and past Puebla’s three majestic volcanoes. One of the volcanoes can been seen spewing forth ash everyday, and Alan informed us that it sometimes is so heavy that it covers everything with a fine layer or dust.

Alan’s home was modest but comfortable and we were happy to relieve ourselves of our luggage and to stretch our legs. Once we were all settled in, Alan took us over to downtown Puebla where we walked around a bit enjoying the main plaza and the beautiful colonial architecture. Puebla has several beautiful churches and there were few tourists. It is a working city instead of a major attraction so we were happy to join the locals by sitting on benches in the plaza mayor enjoying the music drifting out from the open air cafes and enjoying our first warm evening in Mexico.

As we grew hungry, Alan guided us to one of his favorite spots in downtown Puebla for chalupas and pazole. The food was amazingly better than anything I’ve had in the United States. I am not sure whether the ingredients are different or if they’re simply fresher. Perfectly ripe tomatilles for example must make a better salsa verde than ones that must be picked before their time and sent on a truck thousands of miles to my local supermarket! The pazole soup was by far my favorite. It contained chicken, peppers, onion, and hominy and was spicy, but not overly so. It was a delicious end to a long day.

Up next our recap of a visit to Puebla’s neighbor, Cholula, its pyramid, shops, and the Azteca solstice celebration. I will try to get some pictures up soon, we took hundreds of them! Thanks for reading and please comment and let us know how we’re doing.

Brian

We apologize for posting our trip to Mexico late, but we had a spotty internet connection the entire time.

We touched down from an uneventful flight into Mexico City right around noon time on Saturday the 20th and proceeded towards immigration to get out passports stamped.  Our traveling partner went first and got through with no issues, but when we approached the counter we discovered that we needed to fill out the bottom section of the form.  This section has wording that makes it look as if its for business travelers only, but don’t be fooled! They sent us over to an empty counter to fill out that part of the form and thankfully told us to come back up as soon as we finished (the line was quite long at this point).

We filled out the bottom section and went back up towards the counter, but the woman who sent us to fill it out was on her way out the door escorting a man to a different area. No what do we do! We don’t want to get back in line, and we didn’t want to make a scene so we patiently waited. After about 10 minutes, another immigration official took pity on us and called us over to her desk where she stamped us in.

Our traveling companion was able to collect all of our bags in the interim and was waiting for us when we walked through the doors. We had but one further obstacle before we were home free and in the country … the infamous button. For anyone who has never traveled to Mexico before, the airport (at least in Mexico City) has a button that you must push which causes a light to flash either red or green. If you get the green light you may leave, red and they search your bags. I got the green light and Amy got the red light so she had to have her bag searched. This was lucky as I had the cart with all of the other luggage which would have taken quite a bit of time for them to go through.

Our traveling companion had brought a ton of luggage that was primarily stuff for her boyfriend who lives in Puebla who would be giving us the tour of both Puebla and Oaxaca. In order to accomadate the four of us and all of this luggage, our traveling companions decided to rent a big SUV from a company called Sixty. We stood outside their office for over an hour (no exaggeration) as they tried to locate a suitable vehicle for us an negotiate a price. We had further issues with this company later on in the trip (more on that later) so I cannot recommend them to anyone traveling into Mexico City.

Once we had the car in hand, we headed out towards Puebla with our Mexican friend at the wheel. The ride through the mountains was beautiful but our first glimpses of the staggering poverty around Mexico City was an eye opener.

More to follow ….

Well, only 2 more full days to go before we are on our way to Puebla. We have an early flight Saturday morning out of JFK and arrive in Mexico City shortly after noon.We’re not sure what the itinerary looks like, we are meeting up with a friend who will be leading the ‘tour’. He had mentioned Tenotchitlan which would be very cool. Afterwards we head down to Puebla for a few days where we will be staying with his family. It will be great to experience Mexico on such a personal level.After that, we are off to Oaxaca for a few days for some Mezcal, Chocolate, Mole, and Monte Alban!Its supposed to be sunny and in the mid 70s to low 80s … WooHoo!We will be posting about the experience and hopefully uploading some photos so stay tuned!

Well, we’re down to 11 days before our short trip to Mexico begins. We will be flying out of JFK and into Mexico City and from there heading down to Puebla to stay with a friend. We don’t have a set itinerary which will be unusual for us, but should prove to be interesting. We will be in Puebla for several days and then heading down to Oaxaca for an additional 3 days.

In anticipation of the trip, I decided that I was not happy with using my PacSafe Daysafe 200 backpack as my day pack due to its size. Its a great bag, but when walking around in a downtown area I find it a little cumbersome. I typically carry around my Nikon and an additional telephoto lens and now that we don’t really ever purchase souvenirs or anything like that, we don’t really have a need to carry much else. Amy wasn’t too keen on losing the big pack just in case we did end up buying anything, but then again she’s not the one carrying it 😉

After some investigation I decided on getting the ‘Crumpler 5 million’ camera bag. My decision was based on 2 primary factors: 1 it doesn’t look like a camera bag, and 2 our local REI shop had them in stock so I was able to take my camera down and try it out. The camera fit perfectly and there’s enough room to store an additional item as long as its no larger than a tele-photo lens. Hopefully that’s enough, we shall see as we tour around.

I’m still bringing the Daysafe as my carryon and just putting the Crumpler inside with our other electronics. We are planning on heading over to Monte Alban and perhaps Tenochtitlan and will most likely bring the Daysafe over the Crumpler because we will want to carry water and perhaps other items.

As luck would have it, while we were at REI, we found an Osprey Meridien 70 liter pack on Clearance! We both have the 90 liter which we have been used on several European jaunts these past few years and love. They have very rugged wheels and the ability to unzip a compartment and turn them into comfortable backpacks. We felt the 90 liters were a bit large for a one week trip so this new 70 liter along with the Daysafe and Amy’s messenger bag, we should have more than enough room.

We’ll put our packing list up over the next few days.

Brian

Over the past few years both my wife and I have found our careers and comfortable middle class lives unfulfilling.  In our desperation and malaise, we discovered BootsNAll as well as a few blogs of other mid career individuals who took the plunge and left it all behind.We have been slowly planning and reading others blogs and have come up with a plan of our own. We are greatly dissatisfied with our careers and dread the thought of continuing to scramble up the corporate ladder for the next 30+ years. We spent a great deal of time examining our likes and dislikes, and decided that we would go back to graduate school in the hopes that we can someday teach.We’re about midway through the graduate program now, and have set our sights upon taking a gap year after graduation (2 years away). We have a lot of baggage that we will need to shed beforehand:

• house
• cars
• furniture
• other household furnishings

We’re hoping to be able to bankroll the trip from the proceeds from selling the above items, so here’s to hoping the economy turns around within the next 2 years!We won’t leave you bored though. We are taking trips to Mexico (Puebla and Oaxaca), France (Paris, Beuane, Provence, Riviera), and Germany (Munich) this year and will be posting about those adventures extensively.Perhaps we should be saving the money shelled out for those trips for the gap year, but 2 years is a long time to wait and wanderlust makes the waiting impossible ;-)We welcome your comments!