January 7, 2014
I had planned to attend the party with the kids from the
orphanage at 15:00, but snagged a crew position on the race boat, Wings, and was disappointed to discover
that I needed to be there at 15:00, since the race start was at 16:00. Wings
is a Peterson Serendipity 43, an older flush decked race boat with two
cockpits. My duty for the day was to
mind the running backs, which put me in the aft cockpit with the
owner/helmsman, Fred. We had a crew of
ten, which was more than we really needed, but enough that Fred and Judy should
always have sufficient crew if some of us couldn’t make a given race.
We went out and sailed around a bit before the start to get
a feel for the boat and working together.
A mother and baby humpback whale surfaced within a hundred feet of the
boat. We shouldn’t have been that close
to them, but nobody told the whales that.
They appeared completely relaxed in our presence. There wasn’t much wind. Four boats showed up for the race. The two cruising boats got a five minute head
start and then we started with Blue,
a J 160 that soon left us behind. We
sailed upwind until we got bored with the lack of wind and decided to withdraw,
turn around, and practice gybing the spinnaker.
We accomplished that remarkably well for an untried crew and the skipper
was pleased with us and optimistic about the coming season of racing.
We got back just about dinnertime. I ran into Don (who had just returned from a
trip back to LA for the holidays) and his friends, Peter and Leslie, as I
headed into town. We decided to go to
the Red Chairs taco stand next door to Philo’s for dinner. Like most of the taco vendors, they didn’t
open until 19:00, so we had to kill about twenty minutes. Fortunately, I just happened to have four
beers in my bag that the owners of Wings wouldn’t
let me contribute. We sat, drinking beer
and chatting, until they started to serve.
Our meals were very tasty, especially the tacos adobado.
After dinner, we headed over to Anna Banana's to listen to
their live music. Nick, who had played a
couple of numbers at Greg and Jen’s party, was the featured act, but the
opening act drove us away after one beer.
We were all tired. Apparently,
things really got rolling later, but I had turned into a pumpkin long before
then.
January 8, 2014
Thursday was a blessedly free day. I didn’t have to go anywhere or do
anything. I spent the day studying
languages and guitar and completed my blog post for the week. It was very relaxing and I enjoyed myself
immensely. After dinner, I walked down
to the marina to watch Into the Storm in
the marina amphitheater. It was a
beautiful starry night and never got the slightest bit chilly. The marina deli served hot dogs, sandwiches
and drinks. There was a good crowd of
cruisers and I was happy to see a number of local families, as well. The movie was in English with Spanish
subtitles so that everyone could enjoy it.
As poor as my hearing was, I was glad for the subtitles, too.
After the movie, I stopped at the Marisol Market to buy
produce. They get shipments on Thursdays
and Sundays and are open until 22:00 so that people can buy fruits and
vegetables. I had been hearing about
this market for two seasons, but they had closed up before I got there. I did manage to buy some tomatoes, bananas
and a head of romaine lettuce that wasn’t too limp. I wanted salad fixings because Don, Peter and
Leslie were coming over for dinner on Sunday.
January 9, 2014
I got up very early because I wanted to run before going on
a trip to the old mining town of San Sebastian.
It was barely light by the time I returned from running around the
marina and was downright dark on the way down.
The steep cobblestones were downright treacherous in the dark and I had
to pick my way down rather slowly.
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| Road to San Sebastian |
Our tour guide, April from Wave House, met us at PV sailing. For political reasons, she was not allowed to
drive her van onto the marina property.
April was an American who had lived in the Puerto Vallarta area since
1985 and had obtained her Mexican citizenship and was actually a licensed tour
guide. She had a very comfortable full
sized Toyota van. Used as I was to
traveling in a minivan with up to 23 people in Chiapas, eight of us in that big
van seemed positively luxurious. We even
had seat belts. We drove into Puerto
Vallarta and then took the road to Las Palmas through Ixtapa to Estancia, where
we turned off onto the road for San Sebastian.
The road climbed steeply through a rare deciduous rainforest (only rainy
during the rainy season) and eventually climbed into a forest of oaks and white
pines. There were thunderheads over the
mountains and the sky looked quite dramatic.
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| Hacienda Jalisco |
Silver was discovered in San Sebastian in the late 16th
century and was mined there continuously until the revolution. By the late 19th century, the
mining operations were owned by multinational corporations. When the revolution started, the foreigners
managing the mines got nervous and left.
During the heyday of San Sebastian, there were seven large haciendas
processing silver ore and five more smaller ones. The town once had 20,000 inhabitants. After the revolution, it was nearly abandoned
and the population dropped to 200 people.
About ten years ago, the road to San Sebastian was finally paved and a
bridge built to span the Mascota River.
Since then, tourism had revived San Sebastian to some extent and there
were about 900 people living there.
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| Silver Smelting Oven |
Our first stop was the Hacienda Jalisco. Once a large silver refinery, it was
abandoned after the revolution (1910-1917) and stood empty until the 1960s when
an American bought it and turned it into a hotel. Before the road was paved, San Sebastian was
really only accessible by airplane and Hollywood celebrities used to vacation
there. Today, it is a museum and bed and
breakfast. All of the mining equipment
was hauled off for scrap during the years it was abandoned, but the brick ovens
when the ore was cooked remain, although the once 200 foot high chimney had
been plundered for its bricks.
From the Hacienda Jalisco, we continued into the town proper
and stopped at La Quinta Mary, a coffee coop where we sampled the local coffee
while listening to the shrieking of two rainbow macaws. San Sebastian had a very temperate climate
and elevation (4200’) that allowed them to grow almost anything. We saw peach, citrus, avocado, coffee and
banana trees. The homes had gardens that
were a riot of edible and ornamental plants.
Most farmers grew at least some coffee and sold the beans to the coop.
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| Coffee Roaster at La Quinta Mary |
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| Old Jail in San Sebastian |
We ate lunch at a family style restaurant where we were
served quesadillas, rice, beans, machaca (a hash of shredded beef and eggs),
tortillas and chicken in a tasty red mole.
Our meal included agua de pina (a refreshing drink made from pineapple
and water) and the price was 110 pesos, which wasn’t bad for such a nice
meal. After lunch, we walked around the
town center. The plaza was undergoing
renovation and there were open trenches which made navigation difficult. We visited a coffee shop located in the
former company store and the old jail, where drunks are still confined from
time to time.
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| The Plaza in San Sebastian |
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| San Sebastian Neighborhood |
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| Santa Gertrudis Mine Entrance |
January 10, 2014
I got up and forced myself to do 18 push-ups, 80 sit-ups and
80 air squats. That woke me up, so I
showered, listened to the net, and made breakfast. I had just enough time to get my language
study in before it was time to head down to the marina to go racing on Wings.
I arrived at 11:00 and we pulled away from the dock by 11:30. The starting line was in Nuevo Vallarta, so
it took us nearly an hour to motor over there.
As someone who has been on a lot of race boats, the skipper, Fred,
warned me that he reserved the right to ask me to do anything and asked me to
keep an eye out for things that seemed amiss.
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| Heading Out to Race on Wings |
The start was delayed and there were two classes starting
ahead of us, so we didn’t actually start until after 13:00. Our first leg was a short one to weather, so
I attended to the running backstays. Next,
we reached all the way to La Cruz. A
reach was not the best point of sail for Wings
and we had a tough time in relation to the other boats. We couldn’t carry a spinnaker when we first
rounded the La Cruz mark, but we eventually worked our way high enough that we
were able to fly the chute the rest of the way to the Puerto Vallarta sea
buoy. We raised the jib, rounded the
mark and doused the chute like we’d been doing it on that boat for years and
charged up to the weather mark, preparing to hoist a second chute at the
mark. The second chute didn’t go up
quite as smoothly. We got it tangled in
the bag, but got it up without too much delay, although we snapped a Fastex
buckle. I dived below to catch the chute
after we crossed the finish line and pull the loose fabric in through the hatch
once the chute was dropped. We hadn’t
won, but we were pleased with our performance as a crew and had a pleasant sail
back to La Cruz while we enjoyed cold beers and sorted and stowed sails and
lines. It had been a gorgeous day with
decent wind. At times we had reached a
speed of nearly eight knots. We were
happy.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so was in a hurry to get
home and eat something, although I did stop at Philo’s to buy tickets for the
upcoming Luna Rumba concert. My friend,
Cara, was arriving the day of the concert and wanted to go.
I got tickets and made a dinner reservation so that we would be assured
of good seats. Then I hustled up the
hill to make dinner and spend the evening chatting with Scott, playing the
guitar and writing. Scott’s nonagenarian
stepfather’s health had failed rather suddenly and he had just been put into hospice. His 90 year old mother had been very ill with
the flu, simultaneously, and Scott thought he would need to travel to Iowa to
be with them. We discussed whether or
not I should come, too, but Scott didn’t think they needed me, also. The internet often made me feel very close to
people at home, but that situation made me feel very far away. It would take me a day or two to get there,
even if I were in a rush.
January 11, 2014
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| Farmers' Market Booty |
Sunday was the one day of the week with no 8:30 radio net
and I used that as an excuse to sleep later than usual and, hence, usually did
not run on Sundays. I got up at 8:00 or so
and had a nice leisurely morning. I
needed bread to make bruschetta for dinner, so I wandered down to the farmers’
market to pick up a fresh baguette. I
was very fond of the cucumber, kiwi, lime juice sold by the juice vendor at the
end of the jetty, so I fought my way through the exceptionally large crowd to
get a cup of refreshing juice and then picked up some strawberries and the
bread before heading home. The
strawberries never lasted long, so I cleaned and froze them, right away. Frozen strawberries make better smoothies (or
strawberry margaritas), anyway.
Don and his friend, Leslie, were coming for dinner, so I
needed to make a trip to the Mega for groceries, which seemed to be my Sunday
routine. I took a collectivo up
there. Those of us who live in
California have long wondered why people get killed trying to run across Highway 5 to avoid the immigration checkpoint in Oceanside. I can tell you why. In Mexico, we ran across the highway all the
time. I did it every time I went to the
Walmart because the bus stops on the wrong side of the road. There is actually a very nice pedestrian
walkway across the highway at the Mega, but no one used it (except me.) The bus stopped a block short of the overpass
so that people could run across the highway before the safety fence began.
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| The Mega |
After returning from the Mega, I barely had time to do my
daily language lessons and a quick online guitar lesson before it was time to
start cooking dinner. I did not have an
oven or toaster, so I fried the pieces of bread in olive oil to crisp
them. I diced the tomatoes and added
olive oil and some of my Tuscan spice mix, plus a dash of Huichol hot sauce to
give them a kick since we were, after all, in Mexico. Don and Leslie arrived just as I was making
the salad. We mixed up a batch of
margaritas (Lime Tang mixed double strength makes dandy margarita mix.) and I
finished the salad, constructed the bruschette and sautéed Tuscan chicken
cutlets while we drank and munched on pistachios. It was a simple meal, but was different than
the usual fare and was well received.
Leslie had brought some homemade rice pudding for dessert and we enjoyed
that with fresh pears. The evening flew
by and it was 22:00 before we knew it and time to say goodnight.
January 12, 2014
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| Sonja's Laundry |
There was nothing more exciting to me than a beautiful day
with absolutely no obligations. I rose
about 6:30 and went for a run. The
clouds that had been ruining by sunrises had departed and it was a gorgeous
dawn, turning the water a liquid copper and silhouetting the boats and
mountains against the vivid sky. I was
back in plenty of time to complete my morning routine in time to enjoy me
coffee while listening to the net. With
Scott in Iowa, we were now in the same time zone. I was sorry to hear that his stepfather
had passed the previous evening. He was
in his late 90’s and had been healthy until his last ten days or so, so it was
comforting to know he had had a good life and been at peace with the process of
leaving it. Still, he would be missed.
After the net, I took my laundry down the hill to Sonja’s
and then came back to enjoy a day of studying and playing the guitar. After a brief nap, I drank a small glass of
diet coke to energize myself. The
trouble with getting up early to run was that I often didn’t get more than
about six hours of sleep and would start dropping off in the afternoon. I didn’t want to waste any of my precious day
sleeping. I spent a fabulous day
studying languages, playing the guitar and making another crayon drawing. For dinner, I made strips of steak with a
guajillo chile sauce. It was a perfect day.
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| Original |
January 13, 2014
Tuesday was almost a repeat of Monday. I spent some time cleaning the house, but
mostly just enjoyed myself after doing 85 sit-ups and 85 squats.
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| Drawing |
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