Cards, Skype and more Cards

Mom and Danny are still here. We're not doing much...but it's tiring not doing much sometimes. The weather has been a huge factor in exactly what we do each day. For the most part, it's been stormy...so we stay inside. Well, as far inside as one can in an outdoor living area.

We've played lots of cards. Rummikub and Liverpool Rummy mostly. Us Wilmes love our cards...so it's good times...except when Denni loses.

Last night we had Alejandro, Mariana, Ale's neice Liz, nephew Ramundo, Gustavo, Karina and their two kids Thamara and Jessica...over for dinner. We bought taco fixin's from a taco place in town...they service 17 different fillings. So we took our cooler and containers and picked several items. I got to teach the girls how to play Wii...that was fun!

So regarding Skype...just thought I'd make mention of it because it's becoming a great way for us to keep in touch with friends and family. Just yesterday, we had a nice chat with my friend Kylie and her family in Sydney, Australia. She has video so we all got to see her daughters Izzy and Abbey. Then later in the evening we talked to Robert and he was able to say hello to the dinner guests (who he knows!). Robert is now in Cabo for his new job...!

Critters

Just sharing some additional photos of Flora & Fauna. Enjoy!

Mom's visit

My mother, Brenda, and her boyfriend, Danny, are here currently. They arrived on Tuesday, July 22nd via Continental Airlines all the way from Ft. Myers, FL. They connected planes in Houston...and luckily it was a day before Hurricane Dolly hit.

It's Friday now and we've had a pretty relaxing time. The weather has been challenging...lots of rain, lots of sun, lots of dead calm, lots of wind. And critters, of course. We had a huge thunderstorm last night (with 3 or 4 periods of electricity outage - a couple of times while we were holed up in the media room watching a movie)...and this morning, the frogs were a barking.

I'm not sure what you call it when frogs talk...is it chirp? Barking or chirping, they were LOUD!

We did venture into Zihuatanejo yesterday...first to Commericial Mexicana to pick up food and house items. Then to Centro to shop and eat lunch. We had tamales at Tamales Y Atole Any...and we walked to Playa Principal to see the fisherman selling their wares. Pretty cool.

We're having a little "party" tomorrow night in honor of my Mom and Danny. So more to come!

Animals (and other things)

The diversity of flora and fauna here never cease to amaze me! The very first day of our arrival we were rewarded with cool insects like a walkingstick and a praying mantis. We had the other normal visitors like crabs, toad, frogs, bats, etc.

Today we found 3 kittens born under a casita bed. Oh my. I guess the parents brought them there to stay warm and dry during the day. We had seen a couple of cats hanging about the last few days...but didn't realize they had kittens. Anyway...they did. So we plucked them up, put them in a box (for safe keeping) and tomorrow we'll take them to the Zihuatanejo SPCA.

Never a dull moment in Troncones.

On top of the fauna keeping us busy, I've been busy picking up trash from the beach. The weather has been pretty stormy, thus big waves, thus crap building up. So I went out and filled up 2 big trash bags full of crap. I never knew that plastic bottle caps would be the greatest # of finds.

Also tomorrow brings the arrival of my mother, Brenda, and her boyfriend Danny. So will have more to share about our experiences soon.

Getting settled

On the drive down here Denni and I decided that we must be organized so that we can make the most of our time in Troncones. We usually come prepared with a list ... but I'm not sure if it's the heat or what ... we end up only getting one or two things accomplished. This time, we're going to get a lot done! Really!

So again, we need a plan. Or at least an understanding of what we want to accomplish every week. So far so good.

I am also keeping a journal. This way we can look back and feel good about what we've done (especially if we get to the point where we feel we haven't done enough). And it's a good motivation to accomplish projects. Otherwise, my diary will be pretty empty!

OK let me pull my notes out... here is what we've been able to do in the last 3+ days:

* Exercise every morning - this means get up early (set an alarm!) and walk the beach for 45 minutes. One of our top priorities is to get in shape (and lose weight - I hate saying that but it is the truth - the drive down was not good for our mid sections!)
* Put together TV stand for media room (which we picked up in PV), took TV out of box and put it on stand and connect to DVD player. We now have an official media room!
* Put together the 2 fishing rods we brought with us...attempted to fish (no luck first time out)
* Put plastic sliders (which we brought with us) on bottom of living room chairs and coffee table so they don't scratch floor anymore
* Put lights on bikes (2 out of 4). We brought these with us.
* Spent time with carpenter going through a long list of "wants" - this took about 90 minutes
* Traveled to Vivero (nursery) with Poli to buy plants for 1. our casita 2. the guest quarters south side 3. fence vines. We also ordered soil. The Vivero delivered our plants and soil same day... Poli put in our casita plants today!
* Organized bodega
* Denni made a psuedo-grill (we brought down a grill plate since it was small enough to store)



And lastly, we were able to entertain friends last night! Ale, Mariana and Peter came by around 7pm and Denni made a wonderful dinner of pork chops, fried cabbage, baked beets and potatoes. It was great. Then, after dinner, we went to the Media Room where I subjected them all to a photo slideshow of our trip down.... and then we played Wii!! It was the first time for all of them.



I am going to include a couple photos from each blog but if you want to see the whole set - check out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moiramw/sets/72157606260345160/

The road to Troncones - the final stretch!

Well, we made it! After 15 days on the road and over 3192 miles across 4 US states and 6 Mexico states we finally made it!

The breakdown and stats include:
June 30: Albany, CA to Truckee, CA - 172 miles
July 1: Truckee, CA to Park City, UT - 581 miles
July 5: Park City, UT to Huntsville, UT - 68.8 miles
July 6: Huntsville, UT to Bryce Canyon National Park, UT - 304.7 miles
July 7: Bryce Canyon, UT to Grand Canyon National Park (North Rim), AZ - 111.7 miles
July 8: Grand Canyon, AZ to Sedona, AZ - 214.1 miles
July 9: Sedona, AZ to Tucson, AZ - 222 miles
July 10: Tucson, AZ to San Carlos, Sonora (Mexico) - 310.1 miles
July 11: San Carlos, Sonora to Mazatlan, Sinoloa - 499 miles
July 12: Mazatlan, Sinaloa to Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco - 278 miles
July 15: Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco to Troncones, Guerrero - 431 miles

It's interesting to look back at the mileage because some of those long stretches seemed to fly by and some of the short stretches took forever! Mostly because of road conditions...or just the fact that the road was WINDY (as in CURVY)! We had two exciting routes where the latter was the case. First was from Tepic to Puerto Vallarta. Very curvy and it was raining. The last case was driving from PV to Trocones along the Pacific. Kind of like driving HWY 1 North of San Francisco!

All in all, the driving experience was much better than we expected. One hears tales of driving in Mexico but we had no issues. Of course, maybe some luck was on our side. Like having rain and clouds meant our car didn't overheat in the hot sections. And we didn't seem to run into traffic (driving during the week?).

We passed probably 10 Federale checkpoints (they are looking for explosives, ammunitions, drugs) and we were waved over for inspection only once. The guy looking in our car was very good natured and we were off again in about 5 minutes.

So that's it for now. I will post updates on life in Troncones...probably once a week, so tune in!

Traveling through Mexico

It only took us about 5 hours to drive from Tucson to San Carlos, Sonora. So we got to Carole's home at about 3pm. We were so happy to have survived the border crossing (green light!) that we were just happy period. We unpacked the car (well, at least what we needed out of it), then drove to the San Carlos Marina to have a drink at the Marina Catina - this is where there is free WiFi! We met a lovely server there - Sheila - and we had a great time talking about Mexico, and life in general. After two margaritas we headed to dinner at a small outdoor restaurant that specializes in seafood. Muey Bueno! We actually walked to the restaurant from the house so it was good to walk around and see the local homes (and just stretch those legs!).

The next day I woke up at 5:15am and we decided to just get up and go. Our original plan was to drive to Culiacan (5 hours) but we altered that to attempt to reach Mazatlan (8 hours). We did it! Mazatlan is a big city of 300,000+. I thought it was going to be tough to find where we needed to go to get a hotel (I have never been there...so wanted to get some tourist experience out of it). We were successful in finding a hotel (a supposed 5 star hotel for $100 - I would actually rate it 3 star). I didn't really care as long as there was a bed and A/C!

We took a taxi into old town and ate dinner in a lovely square (Plazuela Machado). We then walked around old town and marvelled at the old buildings. So much character! Denni now has dreams about buying one and fixing it up! Anyway, after walking a bit, we stopped at one of the two gay bars in town - Vitrello's. It was too early for much activity, but we had a beer and talked a little bit with the server.

The next day we left Mazatlan around 8:30am and headed to Puerto Vallarta. There is a brand new toll road for 5 hours of that drive but there are no gas stations so luckily we had enough to make it (the gas light came on about 10 miles before we got to the first gas station - whew!). This was in Tepic. From there, we got off of Hwy 15 for the first time to take Hwy 200 along the coast to PV. It was raining and the road is really curvy so it was a white knuckler for awhile, but we survived.

We got to PV around 6pm (we think - the time zone changed and we forgot to move our clock ahead in Mazatlan so at this point we were two hours behind in our car clock/watches). When we finally got into Bob & Gil's condo, it was just heavenly. Not just because we were happy to be out of the car after a long day of driving. But because they have a jaw droppingly beautiful condo up on the hills above PV. We were a bit stunned. So we made ourselves a martini and went and swam in the pool, then made dinner in. We're going to really enjoy staying here for 3 nights!

We crossed the border!

We left Tucson at 7am and got to the border around 8:10am. It had been raining all morning so once we actually drove into the small town of Noglas, the streets were FLOODED! On top of that I was so paranoid about not having enough pesos that we went on a wild goose chase to find an ATM. Actually, not too wild. It was just that the ATM wasn't working and I ran to/from the car in pouring rain and got muey wet! Denni then tried to no avail and one of the bank workers directed her to another ATM which she walked to in the rain. But we got our pesos!

About 21 KM past the border we stopped to get our tourist visa and our car permit. This all went pretty smoothly even though the parking lot was flooding fast. I had visions of us driving through flooded roads all the way to San Carlos, but alas, once we got our car permit, we didn't experience any flooding. And the side benefit to all this was that the cloud cover keep us and the car cool.

The Wild West...

Since my last post, we have traveled many miles through Utah and Arizona. From Park City, we drove 1 hour North to the quaint valley town of Huntsville, Utah to visit our friend Elsa Svensson and her husband Ron. We got into town early enough to sit around and talk, then partake in a hamburger at the oldest bar in Utah, then walk a bit along a lake trail. Elsa and Ron have just completed their dream retirement home and it is stunning!

From there, we drove down through Utah on I-15, then cutting off on a beautiful 2 lane road to get to Bryce Canyon. We stopped at a big chain store in Ephraim, Utah to buy "The Club" (car anti-theft device). We did this for added insurance in Mexico. We got to our hotel destination, Ruby's Inn, around 6pm. This particularly hotel is located very close to the park entrance and it was buzzing with tourists. I swear I heard more German and French than English. It is a great time for European tourists to visit the US (based on the Euro/Dollar exchange).

Anyway, we went to bed early with the plan to get up early and hit the park early. We were pretty successful at this! We got to our first viewpoint at 8am. We stopped at 4 viewpoints and hiked 3 trails. The first trail was a 30 minute easy one. Then we hit the biggy, the Navajo Trail which drops steeply through high walls. It's a mind-blower! Very cool! At the bottom of the trail we connected to the Queen's Garden trail which went another 2 miles. The two together was the best trail I've ever been on. Unimaginably beautiful!

We left Bryce Canyon around noon...and got to our lodging at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at 3pm. Actually, it was 2pm because Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, we we gained an hour when we crossed the border from Utah to AZ. We decided to have dinner at the Grand Canyon Lodge which sits right on the North Rim. I made a reservation and we drove in at 5pm. It's about an hour drive from Jacob Lake (where we stayed) and the North Rim. We did the Bright Angel trail, then had a wonderful dinner. It was a wonderful night.

The next day, we didn't get up early or attempt to tackle big trails. We took it easy. We left Jacob Lake around 10am and got to Sedona at 3pm. The drive was amazing. Especially the last 25 miles from Flagstaff to Sedona on Alt89. We stopped along the way to take pictures. Our accommodation that night was at the Hilton Resort and Spa. We have Hilton Honors points that we used to stay there for free...so that was NICE! And indeed it was nice. We were upgraded to a suite and the room was lovely. We had been staying in some pretty cheap places so this was upscale! We walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner then went to bed. Our plan was to get up early and hike but I woke up with coughing fits all night* so we slept in.

* For the past 8 days I have had a horrible "tickle" in my throat. It actually started in San Francisco and Denni thought it was from the smoke in the air, but it continued in Park City...but there I attributed it to the extreme dryness. I must say, it's been pretty dry all along the way. I'm really hoping it stops soon! I'm tired of coughing!

I've updated my pictures from the trip at Flickr. Check them out at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moiramw/sets/72157605978102900/#

Great news

Just wanted to share some great news. While we were in Park City, we met a lady, Carole Fontana, who owns a house in San Carlos, Mexico. This is pretty close to where Denni and I were going to stay the first night. So now we get to stay at Carole's home!

Then, when we were talking to Robert & Michael in Park City, one of them mentioned their friend's, Bob & Gil, condo in Puerto Vallarta. One thing led to another and now we're staying at their condo when we arrive in Puerto Vallarta.

All in all, very cool indeed!

On the road to Troncones, Part I

Denni and I left on Monday, June 30th to start our journey to Troncones, Mexico. Stops we plan are:
* Truckee, California (to visit Stacy Swineford)
* Park City, Utah (to visit Michael Miller & Robert Huggins)
* Huntsville, Utah (to visit Elsa Svennson)
* Bryce Canyon National Park (for hiking!)
* Grand Canyon National Park (my first time)
* Sedona, AZ (to check it out)
* Tucson, AZ (a place to stay so we can cross the border at Nogalas)

We haven't determined where in Mexico we're staying along the way. But we'll definitely stop in Puerto Vallarta for a day or two. So more to come!

Today is July 4th. We're in Park City and it's also Michael's 39th birthday. We were lucky enough to watch the parade line-up right outside Robert & Michael's home. It was great food, great friends and a great parade!

Here is a link to our roadtrip photos...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moiramw/sets/72157605978102900/#. They are also shown as a slideshow to the right.