tbaroundtheworld

Empalme is a little town on the southern side of Guaymas where we often go looking for birds. I remember the first time I heard its name which by the sound of it had to be something exotic, like “rest in the shade of a coconut palm while soft tropical breezes cool your fevered brow.” Or “place where the Aztecs came to worship the sea gods.” Well, you can imagine the letdown I had when I actually went and translated the term and came up with “train junction.” It’s only fair, since trains and the train yard represent the main thing you see when you drive through town, starting with the giant parked train at the far side of the causeway and the line that crosses MX15 where I’ve almost been crushed on a couple of occasions. Trains are what Empalme is all about. Although as a little city, it’s kind of nice –  neighborhoods made up of tiny houses in bright colors, their bare dirt front yards trimly kept with a couple of potted plants and maybe a lemon tree or two. Many of the roads ar...

It seems as though every trip we make takes on some sort of theme. Never intentional, rather the patterns of our behavior coalesce around some goal that assumes the raison d’etre for us being where we are. In Barcelona it was finding as many Roman ruins as we could. In Sevilla, trying to take as many Semana Santa processions as passed through our neighborhood. Paris, finding all the paintings we could think of in The Louvre. And here, in San Carlos, it’s about finding Tacos. As previously reported, we really like JJ’s Tacos for the ambience and the food. And the dancing on Music Night. Having had such a blast this previous Tuesday, dinner last night (Friday) could only be in one place, given that the band was once again playing. So off we went after a disappointing sunset (adequate clouds, but no color) to that taco shack by the main drag. JJ has a big collection of license plates, nailed to the beams supporting the palapa and we brought him one from our humble burg. He was pleased...

It’s pretty easy to settle into the slow rhythm of a place like this. You develop a nice routine – get up early, breakfast on the seawall, a walk down to the point, a drive around town looking for birds. Reading the afternoon, a glass of wine for the sunset and then dinner somewhere out in town. We made our obligatory trip into Guaymas for those essentials we didn’t have and made some cursory passes over the birding hot spots, actually meeting one of the women who helped (via a group organized by a snowbird) on last year’s count. That chance encounter was out at a couple of sewage ponds at the end of a nasty track, well off the main road and into the desert. In other words, one of those special places you visit when you want to know which of your favorite feathered friends are kicking it around town. Dinner-wise it’s been a banquet, one night of sopa de tortilla , another at our favorite Italian place, a nice fish dinner and a boat of a margarita at the purported narco-restaurant. T...

Boy it’s been a long time since we’ve gone anywhere. Aside from a quick trip up the road to meet our delightful granddaughter Lydia a couple of weeks ago, the last 6 months have been a blur of horse show management, remodeling, gardening and other assorted hot weather tasks that pretty much keep both or at least one of us around the house. But now it’s the last month of the year and time to take that southbound highway until the road runs out on the sunny shores of the Sea of Cortez. This trip in always done in two parts, 6 ½ hours to Tucson, a night’s rest and then another 5 hours into Mexico.  When it works, we have a night out at Falora, our favorite pizza place with Barbara, our favorite cousin. On our last trip in February, we got to know Ari, the owner and he was glad to see us again (once he realized that it was us. It’s always nice to be known at a place off your beaten path. Phase Two commenced with a great breakfast and a walk along the new park that borders the Sant...

Prehistoric Man had one thing on all of us – he never experienced Jet Lag. And of course that’s also true for Bronze Age Man, Iron Age Man, Roman Era Man, Medieval Man, Renaissance Man and all of humanity up until Alcock & Brown decided to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland in June of 1919. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith kept the ball rolling with the first Trans-Pacific flight in May of 1928, and since that time it’s all been downhill although I suspect that those early flights were so slow and so tense that no one thought much about how they felt the morning after their arrival. Prior to the first mention of the term by a columnist by the name of Horace Sutton in a February, 1966 article in the Los Angeles Times, no one had any  name for it. Jet travel was not yet 15 years old when the phrase was coined and I suspect people had an idea about what was afflicting them, even if they didn’t know what to call it. Well I know a lot about it, knowledge gained painfully over these las...

We chilled out at home for a couple of hours, arranging our suitcases and getting in the “time to go home” mindset. The gray weather had passed and there was actually sunshine pouring in the skylights so we thought it might be nice to have an early evening walk. We left, headed down Carretas across Puerta del Sol and picked up Arenal for a stroll down to the Opera district. The weather was nice now, no clouds, a mild temperature and just enough of a breeze to be enjoyable. We took a new street out of the Plaza de Cervantes and walked through some nice neighborhoods, well-tended apartment buildings, clean streets, nothing like the commercial grime of the street where we’ve been staying. I’d remarked about the cleanliness of our neighborhood when our train to Avila passed through the northern suburbs. No uncollected trash, no overflowing bins. I think it comes from the mix of the area around Plaza Mayor, where you have tons of restaurants and shops located on the ground floors of the ap...

Over the last couple of years we’ve sort of stumbled into a kind of tradition, walking down to the Royal Botanic Gardens, taking a stroll and getting rained on. That was pretty much the agenda for today, and as one can hope for on any travel day, all the pieces fell into place. The one thing we had somehow managed to miss over these last two weeks of fun has been a healthy meal of chocolate and churros. I did have that folder full of them back in Sevilla, but I’d forgone the chocolate in the interest of being able to fall asleep. We’ve spent the last couple of days wandering around here and yet the time never seemed right. So this morning we left home with the express goal of having a second breakfast comprised of that most wonderful Spanish treat. Rather than take the long haul to the Valor over on Gran Via, we chose instead to patronize San Gines, the older churreria in Madrid, and unfortunately a favorite of tourists (the place is mentioned in every guide book ever published in...

Today was tagged a recovery day after the rigors of yesterday’s travel. We decided that we would visit the Museo Arqeológico Nacional for a change of pace. Rather than experiencing history in situ, we thought it might be different to visit a collection of it. And as it turned out, we’re very glad we did. Stopping for coffee at a Starbucks on Alcala, we took a window seat and spent some time assessing passersby as tourists or locals. From there it was a downhill stroll to the Paseo del Prado, stopping along the way to watch a drama unfold in the very busy intersection in front of the Metropolis Building. Two women were frantically trying to stop traffic, but we couldn’t figure out why. They had their faces in the driver’s side window of a red compact car that suddenly started to roll into the oncoming traffic. A motorcyclist jumped off his bike, swung open the door of the rolling car and tried to steer it out of the oncoming cars. But he couldn’t turn the wheel and the car continue...