Trip North

Hola to all of you who check the blog. We will be traveling north to Indiana and Maine for the summer, so I obviously won't be writing about Mexico; at least that's not the plan. We have a young grandaughter, Isabelle, in Muncie, Indiana, the daugher of our son Eric and daughter-in-law, Crystal. We will be arriving to spend about a week over the 4th of July holiday in the now blue state of Indiana. We will then be traveling north, stopping in Erie, PA to briefly visit our friends from Mexico, Fred and Mardele, and their daughter's family, and pick up a couple of small pieces of furniture to bring back to Mexico for them. (Fred and Mardele have lent us their GPS system to use on the trip up; that should be fun to try out). Then we're off to Maine, arriving around July 10. There we'll spend time with our daughters, Wendy and Cassie, my Dad (who turns 89 on Friday) and Stepmom, Joy, and other family and friends. We'll be staying with Curt and Judy Webber, who have appeared on this blog, using their home as a home base. How wonderfully generous of them. They may return to Mexico for their third trip, possibly this fall? We are looking forward to seeing Pixie's siblings and their families and my two brothers and their families. We will spend time with our old friends in Maine, and follow the Red Sox from Red Sox Nation! (They are four games up as I write this morning). We'll stop by Indiana again on our return trip, then be back in Mexico by the end of August.

I may post some family photos and some commentary about our trip, but not as frequently over the summer. I'll return to commentary about our life in Mexico in September. Best wishes to all for a safe and joyous summer. You can still reach us by email, of course. Hasta luego, amigos!

Colima

Here are our beautiful wives posing at our house this week at our "grub club" Jamaican dinner. We wanted to form a dinner group, but did not want to feel the pressure of calling it a "gourmet dinner group," so we settled on the prosaic title of "Grub Club." Pixie is surrounded here by Jeanne and Susan before we enjoyed our Jerk Chicken and other Jamaican delicacies.

Of course the big event for this week was our brief foray to Colima to celebrate out thirty fifth wedding anniversary. Colima is best known for its two volcanoes, one still active, nearby. Unfortunately, the weather was hot and too hazy to get a good view of the volcano, but here is a file photo of the volcanoes so you can get an idea of how impressive they are:

Colima itself is a fairly large city quite near the Pacific to the beach at nearby Manzanillo, so they don't stop. Colima has been the victim of numerous earthquakes over the years so it doesn't have the beautiful colonial buildings other Mexican cities do, although it was actually one of the earliest cities the Spanish settled. We stayed in the center of town on one of the two central plazas, saw some pre-hispanic archaelogical artifacts, and ate some wonderful Mexican food. We saw almost no gringos in Colima, quite a switch for us. Colima is famous for its Colima dogs, pottery dogs which represented the polular hairless chihuahuas which were popular then, especially as food. The indigenous people made pottery models of these dogs which they buried with people to help their way to the afterlife. Here are some photos of these well-preserved artifacts:

The plaza was beautiful and classically Mexican, surrounded by long buildings on all four sides which included restaurants and shops in the porticos. There was an ongoing chess group which drew lots of curious onlookers. We attended a band concert in the gazebo on Sunday night. You will notice one purple -haired Mexican nina in one of the photos, a rarity here. Here are more photos:

Closer to home, we have had a big event for the past few weeks. Our calle (street), Santa Margarita, has been the street from hell. It was rough and we had to drive very slowly on it to keep from scraping the bottom of the car. Everyone has been complaining about it. The crew came in a few weeks ago and has been doing the backbreaking work of fixiing our road by resetting the cobblestones. They work in the hot sun from 7-6 each day. Here's a photo of them working:

On a walk the other day, Maggie and I ran across this group of goats grazing in the road. Maggie, presumably thinking they were dogs, was anxious to meet them, but the goats were not pleased with her "friendliness."