Colossal Shrimp

Colossal shrimp may be an oxymoron but here in San Felipe they are good stuff. These babies are so big they run 6-7 to the pound and are best obtained any late morning by driving slowly along the malecon, the street fronting on the downtown beach where the fishermen pull in their pangas. Look for a pick-up truck or a car with the trunk open. A man (I have not seen a woman vending there) will be standing nearby waving a specimen at passing cars. Pull alongside, look in each of the coolers at the shrimp in ice water, choose the size and take a sniff to be sure they are indeed fresh. This is the height of the season and the prices are the best they'll be. Colossals are running about $18 per kilo and the smaller sizes are correspondingly less. Actually, the biggest are best butterflied or grilled and a couple make a meal though the smaller are better for cocktails or in mixed dishes. The flavor of this seafood that hasn't been frozen is so superior that we seldom eat shrimp in the States.

 

Well, that was the train trip of a lifetime!

First, ignore the fact that I pushed the Go button twice and you now have TWO pictures of Deidra. I looked up how to edit and it is too involved to deal with now that I have a bit of time to devote to relating our great train ride through Copper Canyon, Chihuahua , Mexico.

We spent five nights and four days on our own 60 foot flatbed rail car and because Deidra is only a bit over 22 feet long, we had all kinds of space front and back. We had thought to sit outside with table and chairs to get the best views but Deidra's picture windows are so large and the screen will move to open the windows completely that we just sat at the dinette table in real comfort and could hang out to get good photos. The train traveled for just a few hours each morning at a leisurely 20 mph and then stopped at around noon so we could hop off and tour, take short hikes, buy baskets and have a group dinner. We shot more than 350 pictures and traded discs with a couple of people so some severe editing is in order before any are shared.

The Barrancas de Cobre are a group of six major canyons and countless smaller ones in an area of 25,000 square miles, the home of the Tarahumara Indians who still mostly live in caves and are the least assimilated of any tribe. Guesses are the population is about 90,000 but they are shy, scattered people and we saw only the folks who have to make a living by dealing with outsiders. We visited two families and were conflicted about going into their private lives and homes but that is how they make their living and we bought a lot of their beautiful baskets and other craft goods . Drought conditions have brought tough times; many have reportly died of starvation and charitable organizations have been importing food. Lucky children go to boarding schools run by private sponsors such as Rotary or the Catholic Church, walking from home Sunday afternoon and back Friday after classes. Pictures of the charming children in the schools we visited will show up here later. I brought a big shopping bag of art supplies to one school and other Vagabundos also contributed school supplies.

We had an excellent Mexican tour leader who joined our group in Chihuahua City and stayed until the last night's farewell dinner in San Carlos. He planned the tours, dinners and local travel arrangements and did and outstanding job. One of the benefits of group travel (we're leery of most of the commercial caravans) is someone competent to do the advanced work. We found this true when we went with the Vagabundos down the Baja to Cabo San Lucas to play with the gray whales in San Ignacio and see the pre-historic cave paintings in the San Francisco mountains. It was much more efficient than trying to make all the detailed arrangements ourselves. We found our fellow Vags on these two trips to be experienced travelers and RVers and all-around good company.

Now we have left daughter Cathy at the Tucson airport to fly home to blizzard conditions in Washington state, sent the new TV set back to Magnavox for exchange because the DVD player won't, loaded up on paper towels, TP, plates and cups (we are on permanent vacation, after all) and crunchy peanut butter, and are back at our winter digs in San Felipe, Baja Norte.

We had a nice welcome just as soon as neighbors saw Deidra in our driveway, even before we got the front door open. They pulled in and we crowded into Deidra, opened the wine and snacks and had a fine party. Settling in for the season requires getting the batteries up, the water system in, the solar panels in place and a thorough cleaning to get rid of the fine desert dust that finds its way in no matter how tightly we close up. This year, for the first time ever, tiny 'sugar' ants found their way in and got into the water jug, sugar, instant mocha cappaccino and salt (?). And maybe it was those teeny guys who found my Red Hat Easter bonnet in the living room closet and ate the foil covered chocolate eggs and the marshmallow chicks right down to the glue. They were very thorough and left only pieces of foil as litter.

The Christmas season is upon us, the party schedule is filling up, but Tecate apparently is not brewing their special Buena Noche beer this year. Too bad...it's fine beer in beautiful cans.
Thursday, at out regular neighborhood cocktail party where we network, gossip and foment rebellion, we will finalize plans for our annual Santa Run. We hang our desert vehicles with lights and decorations, plug in a sound system for carols, and from a flat bed trailer hand out some 600 toys and lots of candy to to kids in the barrio. We move slowly enough down the streets that enterprising youngsters can stash their swag and run ahead to the next block to get more.Then we repair back to the ranch for hot buttered rum and a great potluck dinner. Our Santa grows a fine full grey beard for the occasion but keeps his jolly tummy all year.

 

On the road again...

Unless someone in our group of 10 RVs going to Copper Canyon has a wifi and is willing to share, this is probably the last entry until we get back into the States November 26.

We're still at the Lone Star Corral Escapee park until tomorrow morning when we set off to meet
Cathy at the San Antonio airport and start driving to Presidio to meet the rest of the Vagabundos.

Don't know yet if today's temp will meet the new record, but yesterday's at 88F was one degree short of the all time high for this date. And humidity to match. A cold front is supposed to come through around dinner time; that will be a pleasure.

We are concerned that Cathy will be able to get here because of the awful weather in the Northwest; floods, more floods and another storm due this weekend. Plan B will to catch up with the tour if we have to wait here for her. Hope not.

We are primed for take-off. Propane, fresh water, pesos, full fridge and freezer etc. We wouldn't be bringing food with us into Mexico normally because the fresh fruit, vegetables and meat are generally better quality than what is available in U.S. supermarkets, but we won't have a chance to shop before we get on the train for five nights. Better quality because the produce is picked when ripe and is mostly local and the meat and poultry are essentially organic; not shot up with growth hormones and antibiotics and not grain finished to add fat. The beef is so lean it requires some oil or fat added during cooking.

So...maybe hasta la vista for a few days.

The ten day celebration of the sausage

We didn't miss the Wurstfest after all. Jim found a brochure for it at the RV dealers, so we went early, 2:30, to the park and were able to use our handicap tag to park right next to the gate but had to wait til 5 pm to go in. Jim got in line then and by the time I got across the street, the people behind him in line had given him a free pass, so admission was 8 rather than $16.

We ate our way down the food aisle: kartoffel krispen (potato pancakes) fried pickles, fried parmesan olives ( really good!) mushrooms in gravy, and a very phallic sausage on a stick. We passed on the entouffee, kolaches, other wursts, some usual fair food such as corn dogs, funnel cakes and cotton candy.

Then we bought a 64 oz pitcher of dark beer and settled in the biergarten to enjoy the oompah bands, dancing and general noise of about 1,500 people having a fine time.

We left at 7:30 because we had been up since 5:30 in hopes of getting the 80 miles to the RV dealer by 8:30, but dense fog and hazardous weather warnings kept us back til almost nine. There was no sense dealing with commuter traffic in such a condition. But by the time we got 'home' to the Lone Star Corral at 9:30, it had been a long day

Huh?

So, just for giggles I tried to get on the park wifi while I was doing the Tripmaker route to the RV guy tomorrow and the page came up. I don't get it.

Love your public library

I wish I knew how to reconfigure my laptop so that I can connect to the various wi-fi networks...it works once in a while but not in the last couple of days...screen says it can't load the page because of a server problem. And all the dial up numbers for the area that my ISP gave me don't work either ("You cannot complete your call as dialed. Please hang up and check the number...") My helpful ISP guy says it must be particular phone I'm using. I don't have access here to another wired phone. I hesitate to ask any of the savvy guys at the RV park because if they screw up my settings or whatever, we will be truly screwed since next week we head into a remote area of Mexico. Bah!

So, here we are in the Hondo TX public library which is, first of all, COOL and secondly has a strong wi-fi signal that quickly told me I was connected and then wouldn't load the page.
The solution, which is temporary at best is to sit in the lovely air-conditioned library and use one of their very fast computers.

This is helpful because we needed to find an RV dealer to fix a couple of problems: the poorly designed range hood switch doesn't work and the panel on the storage door needs to be properly installed. Just looking for Four Winds as the model doesn't cut it. Apparently the motor homes are a different species from the travel trailers and 5th wheels. When I asked one dealer what was the big deal because the appliances are the same, he said he didn't have a license to work on anything with an engine. Can't argue with that logic.

We have however made contact with the right dealer(Hopefully!!) and will be at his door when it opens at 8 tomorrow morning, though he said the men don't usually get working til 8:30. New Braunfels is northeast of San Antonio and we are some 40 miles west, so it will be an early start.

New Braunfels has a strong German immigrant history. We were there a few years ago for the Wurstfest, a famous version of Octoberfest. Lots of sausages, beer, strudel, oompah bands (the tuba player could have fitted into his huge horn) accordians, lederhosen, and fun. And of course the volksdanzen Chicken Dance as performed by enthusiastic beer drinkers.

Unfortunately, this year's Wurstfest was last weekend, so we missed it.

The citizens of the park cleared out their storage sheds for Saturday's flea market and we scored some neat stuff for which we have no room: a new Belgian wafflemaker, stick mixer, little 12v heater, a small singing Santa and an almost new English folding bike. The bike will go on the back bumper rack along with my scooter, a five gallon gas can and three folding director's chairs. Happily I have an spouse/engineer who is responsible for that outside stuff. I have already paid him off in waffles and some of our hoard of Vermont maple syrup.

Hey, this library computer business is great. Jim does the Sudoku in the local paper while I lose some of my frustrations at a computer that likes me.

Still in Texas

We're at the Escapees Park near San Antonio , enjoying good company and nice weather but I am am really frustrated with the wifi and am about to give up trying to get the blog published because after I write another piece of deathless prose and go to post it, I am kicked off. I may just give up and start up again when we get to San Felipe and I can hitch onto our friend Susie's broadband.

We Gotta Go Where It's Warm!

After a fine 12 day visit with daughter Lynne and an absolute sensory overload of spectacular Blue Ridge/Appalachin Mountains foliage (different from Vermont but equally impressive) we pulled out of her driveway this morning with a dusting of snow on us and another below freezing forecast.

Heading south should help, you'd think, but here at our Escapees Club Racoon Valley park just a bit north of Knoxville TN, we have had to disconnect the water hose and store the filters inside because the temps are to be below freezing again tonight. And the water tank heaters are on, again.

Why reading the owner's manual can be a rewarding experience:
We had been concerned that the fresh, black and gray water tanks were only two-thirds the size of those in the 27 ft 5th wheel, where the two of us got along nicely for two or three weeks between dumps but the black water tank meter showed it filling at a rate that made us wonder how three of us were going to manage when Deidra was fastened to the railroad flat car for the four or five days of next month's Copper Canyon trip. We will carry ten or twelve extra gallons of fresh water in those blue bottles and can probably drain off the shower and sink water at some point, but the black tank capacity was a worry.

It got to a crisis last night when I brushed my teeth using the bathroom sink and the water didn't drain out of the bowl! Jim was reading the owner's manual looking for info on when to do the first oil change on the engine and came across the very interesting note that on some models the water from the bathroom sink goes into the black water tank! Aha! I dipped the water from the sink bowl and dumped it into the galley sink and put a paper towel in the bowl so we'd know if it was backing up (it didn't). We made a smooth run out of the North Carolina mountains and are now in a much more comfortable state of mind.

We enjoyed being able to hang out with the locals in Banner Elk; one can feel so superior to the folks who spend all that money buying those expensive condos by the ski slopes that they can only use part time. We had a dinner party at Lynne's little house in the valley that ended with a late night fireside gathering in her front yard where her friends remarked that she was burning 'tourist wood' from the supermarket. We went to hear one of Emmylou Harris's best concerts, comped because Lynne works for the area newspaper consortium. We all had a fine time, along with 20,000 other folks at the Woolly Worm Festival (we knew them as caterpillers when I was a kid). We had dinner with my sister, her husband (from Florida)and daughter which was nice but the restaurant was so noisy we had to yell to each other.

We also had dinner on top of Sugar Mountain at the home of a friend, the one who had loaned us one of his luxury mountaintop condos last spring. I loved the gas fireplace with remote control and the Jacuzzi in the bathroom that could hold eight or nine people. The problem was that filling the tub 2/3 full took all the hot water in the place. Ah, the pain.

Last Sunday Lynne and I drove to Blowing Rock to hear Evensong at the local Episcopal church. It was a lovely mountain drive over and back and the service was beautiful with a fine choir.

So, now Jim and I point Deidra south and west, trying not to drive much more than 200 miles a day but keeping in mind that we need to be in San Antonio a few days before the 11th when we meet daughter Cathy at the airport and start the much awaited two week Copper Canyon trip. We need to have everything, groceries, propane, toilet paper, wine on board because there will be little opportunity to shop or do laundry after we cross the border.