I Feel A Hot Wind On My Shoulder

Spent the night in the Hotel de Gringo, ate breakfast there with a group of twanglicious dove hunters who behaved pretty much as I expected they would and then hit the road for another five hour drive out to the coast on Mexico's finest asphalt.

As I mentioned, it's some arid country out there in the thick of it. There's a lot of sun, sand and wind that will wash away the most stubborn road sign you put in front of it. Thankfully it was a straight shot out to the Gulf of California so we wouldn't have to pay attention to these whited out signs.

Or so the map would have you believe.

Somewhere near... I'm not sure, I couldn't read the sign, but there was a detour in the highway that brought us to a thinner two lane highway that passed long empty train stops and windblown bull fighting rings. We lost all track of where we were or how we were to get to where we were trying to get to. The Rand McNally map of Mexico was as useless as Jimmy Buffet singing to us about "way down in Mexico." Screw you Buffet.

We finally came upon a small town that had a sizeable square of grid patterned streets. We pulled over at a corner liquor store/bar with a great big Tecate sign (looking back on it, it's interesting to note that it was a Tecate sign – more on this later (maybe)) where my brother asked directions with his fluent Spanish. We finally finagled a route to some other highway and it was more or less smooth sailing to Puerto Penasco.

There was the confusion as to which signs for which luxury condo complex we were to use as directions, and there was the brief moment of panic when I pulled the truck over for my dad to get his navigation shit together and ended up spinning wheels in the desert sand, but we got there.

"There" was a 4 bedroom house on the beach, literally yards from the water. I got in, kissed my wife and son hello, congratulated my mother on a fine choice of rental, and made it clear that I was gonna shake the desert heat and hit that water post haste. The response from my mother was as if I had told her I was gonna go find a diseased cow, kill it with my bare hands, eat it, poop it out, then finance its run for president of a local condo committee.

"Really?!?!?!?!"

There probably weren't that many punctuation marks with the question, but it seemed odd she was so shocked by the idea, when most anyone who knows me knows that I can't spend a couple of minutes near a body of water without getting into it if feasibly possible.

Cold, that water was. Not snow melt in Northern California on New Years Day cold, but colder than I was expecting from the sunny shores of Mexico. And that's where the shock lay for me madre. It seems that my folks acclimated to Phoenix, and my brother and my sister-in-law acclimated to Costa Rica, were freezing their asses off in the 70 degree weather.

Coming from 35 degrees and wet in Seattle, it felt pretty damn good to me.

To be continued…


Feb(r)uary Song Of The Day: “(Well) Dusted (for the millennium)” by Giant Sand (The balls on these guys to smuggle the title of the song between two parenthesis, like the balloon full of coke inside the pretty young thing muling it on in).