(I already emailed this to many of you. I (Dan) wrote it during our road trip and the first couple of weeks here. I'm finally posting it two months later.)

Pre-trip preparations.
Packing hell and deep cleaning trying to clear our stuff out of the way so our renter will have no excuse not to pay us the rent we need to cover our mortgage while we are gone.
Last minute car seat purchase for Joji. Last minute searching for a used car top carrier, which we didn’t end up buying. Multiple loads of stuff to goodwill I didn’t get a chance to mow the lawn, take apart the trampoline, or mulch the front flower bed. Kori had several last minute duties for her endless consultant gig. If Mom hadn’t come to help us, I doubt we would have gotten out of town at all. We wanted to leave Monday morning, and actually were able to on Tuesday afternoon.

Tuesday. Tallahassee to Pensacola

After a morning of car cleaning, returning the wrong sized car seat and getting another, lots of final packing, and Joji’s super-long morning nap, we left Tallahassee Tuesday 2 pm in a downpour. Drove to Pensaola. Joji quite interested in rain and TRUCKS from his car seat. Uh Uhh for trucks passing continues through whole trip. We enjoyed muffins and raisins provided in a care package from Kori’s friend Tricia.

Very hot after the rain. Stopped at rest areas to play Frisbee and throw pine cones.
Read Harry Potter while Kori drove. Joji slept well. Stayed in a hotel with pool in Pensacola.

Wednesday. Pensacola to Houston
Wednesday, drove through New Orleans, and Cajun country without really exploring.
Searched for Cajun dinner without finding it. Got lost in Beaumont because we missed the good exits for eating and took only exits without easy on-ramps back to the highway. Chinese food and then a little Frisbee in a grassy field before getting back on the highway. Arrived late in Houston. Stayed with Andy.

Thursday. Houston to Beeville, TX
I spent several hours very early Thursday morning walking around Andy’s neighborhood with Joji, who said “uh uhhh” at all the birds. Warm morning became blazing hot by 9 am. Great breakfast by Fabiola. Mai and Vanessa (Andy and Viviana’s daughter) bonded nicely. Went to see Viviana about 11 am. Stuck in traffic on the way. Pleasant chat and pizza for lunch.

Landscape finally changing from oak and pine to mesquite scrub. Ranches and some oil derricks. Different raptors. A coyote on the side of the road. Two-lane highway.

Left Houston 1 pm or so. Drove to Beeville, Texas. Expensive Best Western or some such hotel. Got barbeque and ate by the pool to speed up kid’s bedtime as much as possible. Joji is fearless jumping into pool.

Mai went sleep walking. She must have picked the wrong door looking for the bathroom and became confused. Hotel staff nocked on our door 11pm with a bewildered girl with wet underpants. (Or so I’m told. I slept through it).
Friday. Beeville to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico
I am very worried about the border crossing paperwork, especially getting the temporary car importation permit. There are multiple steps involved, and I’m afraid it will take a long time.

Long, but nice breakfast at the hotel. We made our own waffles with prepared batter. Many Spanish speakers in the breakfast room. Drove to Laredo. Arrived at border about 12 noon. Got lost trying to find the office for the vehicle permits. Got confused by directions and roads that look like they are one-way, but aren’t, and got stuck in the traffic jam of cars waiting to to back across the bridge to the USA. Amid a symphony of honking horns from irate drivers, one of the women selling trinkets and phone cards to the motionless traffic escorted us across four lanes of blocked-up traffic to a side street, and removed a barrier so we could stay in Mexico. I gave her a tip. She volunteered to sit in the car and show us exactly where the office was we were looking for, but there was literally no room in our car to accept this offer! Successful located the car-visa office (CIITEV) and spent a long time waiting there. First they sent me back to the migracion office on a different crossing bridge 1 to get our passports and FM3 visas stamped. I again had trouble following the directions to find the office. Finally parked the car and went on foot in the hot, hot sun. The migracion officials weren’t too pleased that I was alone with four sets of passports and visas, but they were friendly anyway and bantered with me about whether Panasonic or Sony is a better brand for a stereo. Then long lines for the various steps to get the car permit. Kori entertained kids in the waiting room of the CIITEV building all morning while I blundered about.

Mai changed her money to pesos. She bravely bought me a packaged pineapple cake for 6 pesos, but it disappeared from the counter top while she was sitting on the floor going through her purse to count the unfamiliar coins. This loss made her quite distraught, but the teller let her take another cake. She was proud to give it to me.

Ate tacos and quesadillas in a shabby restaurant at the CIITEV office complex. Kori said the kids had a lot of fun on a sloped metal ramp that led to the bathrooms.

On the road again at 4 pm. Drove to Monterrey. First some impressive mountains, then lots of traffic and construction on the long stretch to the hotel zone. Stayed at an expensive Hampton Inn. Stressful dinner at VIPS because Kori in a hurry for kids to get to bed. There was a great play area in that restaurant, however. 10 pm bedtime for the kids Joji, of course, is up by 7 am the next morning. Another nice hotel breakfast, but a late start.

Saturday. Monterrey to San Luis Potosi
Mesquite scrub has given way to impressive landscapes of Joshua trees, mountains, and plateaus with dust devils. The land is a thick, green desert. Four lane highways. Lots of fast cars with Texas and Nuevo Leon plates. Slow trucks and very fast sedans. Cool weather in the mountain passes and the high plateau!

Stopped for our first tank of Mexican gas, bought tacos de barbacoa, and ate them taking turns following Joji around to keep him out of the traffic. He said “uh uhh” at each and every passing semi truck. There were a lot of trucks. Nice Mexican boy at the taco stand rapidly returned Kori’s sunglasses when she dropped them, and brought Joji’s sippy cup to the car when we left it at the table. Mai preferred the taco de barbacoa over the quesadilla we got her. We crossed the street in the car, drove through a dusty unpaved parking lot with HUGE potholes, and made our first ATM withdrawal at a police station in some dusty town whose name I no longer remember. A police officer armed with a sawed-off shotgun sat slumped in a chair watching me withdraw money.

We made it to the “Sands” hotel in San Luis Potosi., after not finding room at several other hotels. It was cold enough for long-sleeve shirts and an extra blanket. Feels nice after Gulf Coast heat. There is a pool, but it is too cold to swim in the evening or morning. A playground had an unsafe slide upon which Mai hurt her foot slightly.

Mai expressed fear about her school. What if the teacher doesn’t speak any English? What if she speaks less than Montse, her teacher in Valencia did? What if nobody in the classroom speaks English?

Getting sick of sleeping 4 to a room. It’s annoying to get the crib out of the car and put it back in under very heavy suitcases. This hotel had noisy guests arrive at 10 pm into the parking-courtyard and I couldn’t’ sleep.

Four-lane highways make driving fairly easy, but very expensive. We’ll spend more than $100 on road tolls on this trip.

Sunday, San Luis Potosi to Puebla.
I am very worried about getting through the Distrito Federal (DF, Mexico City). At least it is a relief that we will be doing this on Sunday, when the “hoy no circula” laws are not in effect. This means there is at least one fewer arbitrarily-enforced law for corrupt cops to use to extort us. I am worried about directions too, because so few streets are signed in any way, and when they are, the names change along the course of the street, making it very difficult to figure out where you are even with a good map, which I don’t have. And finally, the traffic is famously horrendous. Taxi’s in the DF always take these crazy, circuitous routes to avoid bottlenecks, but I’ll be hitting all of them! Traffic is better on Sundays, so that is good.

For the last several days, when I am not reading her Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or when we are not listening to a different Harry Potter book on tape, (a gift from Tricia) Mai is listening to the CD “Philadelphia Chickens” on headphones, and singing along with all the songs, loudly, and over and over again.

Mai is very excited that we will get to Oaxaca tomorrow. She sings about it to tunes from “Philadelphia Chickens.”

Driving was not nearly as bad as I had feared. There is a new toll road that skirts much of Mexico City to Texcoco, and we zoomed around most of the DF, on the north. But from Texcoco to Los Reyes (where the toll road goes up over the pass between the volcanoes Iztacihuatl and Popocatepetl), the road is a rather difficult open-access road with side streets and businesses and lots of aggressive traffic and busses zipping in and out to the right lane to pick up passengers. There are no street signs, and this went on and on for many miles. A police car soon pulled us over because we don’t have license plates on the front of the car, as is required by Mexican law. The cop threatened to bring us to the police station to pay the fine, although I explained to him that Florida does not require two plates. “But we are in Mexico, and you must have two license plates,” he said. He carefully examined the temporary import papers for the car, took my drivers’ license, and told me to follow him to the police station. I resigned myself to whatever was going to happen, and prepared to follow him. But he pulled over next to me, gave me back my driver’s license, and said I should ask for a second license plate, because that will give me lots of problems.

We drove on. Ten minutes later, another police officer pulled us over. He looked at my temporary import papers, and waved me on.

After stopping several times to confirm directions, and then taking a round-about, but thankfully mostly signed route to avoid road construction, we got back on the expensive, easy to drive highway over the mountains out of Mexico valley. Cena at a roadside restaurant amid pine trees and cool air.

Drove into Puebla to find a hotel. I was relieved to have passed Mexico City in only 5 hours and two uneventful cop encounters.


Monday. Puebla to Oaxaca
This last stretch was longer than I remembered it. We stopped on the way to go to a community museum near Tehuacan, but after a confusing drive through narrow village streets, we found it closed. I guess because it is Monday. Also made a gas stop at a station with an “Italian Coffee Company” franchise. We ate sandwiches while the kids got filthy playing on play equipment in a patio of the restaurant. Fantastic scenery through the Canada region. Steep mountains, curving road, thick with cordon cactuses. Unfortunately, we had a lot of time to see this scenery as we waited for construction delays to clear up. Of course, wherever the traffic was stopped, there were vendors ready to sell fruit and candy and sodas and snacks, even in remote locations. We bought a bag of rambutans, of all things. (a tropical fruit not native to the Americas). When the one-lane open to traffic became available for transit, cars at the back of the line zipped up to cut in front of the line, which cultural Anglo-saxons such as myself find very annoying.

Arrived 5 pm in Oaxaca. Stopped by the land lady’s house to get keys, she let us in.


First week in Oaxaca.
The house is more basic than we expected. There is one entrance to the street, where we have always been able to find street parking, a sitting room with a bed leaning against the wall for guests, a dining room with a futon where guests can stay, a kitchen with a convenient high counter and a table where we eat. There are three bedrooms behind a small service patio, which open to the sky. Construction is concrete, with tile and cement floors.

The kitchen has a refrigerator. Gas stove connected to a propane tank. A blender. Plates and utensils and pots and pans. There is a stereo and TV and VCR. Telephone service exists theoretically, but the phone doesn’t seem to work. The wireless internet service, however, works fine! The gas was disconnected, and it took me a while to figure out where the switches and levers were. One of the two tanks was empty. The pilot on the hot water heater was out, but I figured out how to turn it on.

Baby-unfriendly stairs go up to two of the three bedrooms. Beds have rough sheets that don’t stay on the bed very well, there are no mattress pads, and the Mexican locks on bedroom doors are very inconvenient because the keys never turn very well and they can only be opened by a key if you close it without disarming the latch. If you don’t disarm the latch, the doors don’t close securely. The tile floors have the advantage of not showing dirt, and the disadvantage of always looking dirty. When it rains hard (which I think is infrequent here) water puddles into the bedrooms and the front room. There is an ancient washing machine that fills very slowly and leaks into the patio and slops water around during its violent spin cycle

We wasted water doing the laundry with extra rinses necessary because we used too much detergent, and drained the water storage tanks on top of the house. After a plumber confirmed that the tanks were empty, the landlord had to send a water truck to fill them. I climbed up onto the roof with him to help hold the hose while he pumped the water out of the truck. This was an interesting, but time-consuming lesson in Mexican infrastructure.

There are no closing cabinets or drawers in the house, just lots of shelves. Almost everything is low and in reach of Joji, the little monkey. We spent the first several days here following him around to keep off the stairs and to stop him from pulling things down on top of himself.

We were a bit depressed at these accommodations, especially considering the price, about US$670. But the location is excellent, an easy walk to the main zocalo, to Santo Domingo, to nice restaurants, to bus routes, to a local market with fresh meat, cheese, tortillas, etc. We spent some time looking at alternative locations. More comfortable apartments are available at similar prices, but nothing with a similar amount of space in a similar location, and furnished. And rents everywhere are really expensive. I don’t know how people live here without Fulbright grants! We are beginning to adapt to the space by moving things out of Joji’s reach and putting up a barricade on the stairs. We’ve figured out how to get drinking water and dispose of the garbage. A maid recommended by the landlord came today to do dishes and mop and hang laundry, and cook a pot of beans once a week or so. (This is one of the few goods or services that is much less costly than in the US. Other prices seem to be about 80% to 100% of US costs.)

Yesterday we drove up to San Felipe del Agua, a village that is an upscale bedroom community for Oaxaca. There is a playground there with unsafe play equipment and a fabulous little play area for small kids. The kids had fun, and we met some interesting parents and their children.

Today, Monday, August 20, was Mai’s first day of school. We took her by car, and she went like a trooper. ALECRIM is a small private school with small classes, affiliated with an “affable” Italian catholic order. People are really nice there, and some of the parents make a 45 minute commute to bring their kids there. Poor girl doesn't understand a thing in Spanish, but many parents have introduced their kids to her already. We left her sitting in her desk with her 14 fellow students. Her schedule is 8 to 2, so we'll pick her up right before our "comida" of black beans, tasajo (flank steak?), and tortillas.

We picked Mai up at 2, and found her inseparable from a new friend, Soroa, who is the bilingual daughter of a Cuban-American professor of Latin American literature and American professor of history involved in a study-abroad program this semester for college students from the Seattle area. We drove them home: they live within easy walking distance of us. I suspect we’ll be seeing them again.

That’s it for now.

DJK.