Early in 2003, Kelly and took our small Toyota Dolphin motorhome — aptly nicknamed “Cando” — into Mexico from Texas. We roamed around for weeks, having many adventures… sometimes TOO many for my taste!

The trip had a couple of purposes (besides pure fun): one was to get out of Colorado for part of the long winter, and the other was to consider whether we might like to live in Mexico.

There are relatively few campgrounds in the areas we explored, though luckily we had an earlier version of this guidebook: Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping: Explore Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize with Your RV or Tent. As they say, don’t leave home without it. It really enabled us to make the trip as we did. Still, it wasn’t always easy to find a place to stay.

I have written and published books before, with Living with Llamas being my biggest success… that link takes you to where you can download it as a free PDF, on my website about llamas. (We raised them in Oregon for 10 years.) So I wrote a book about this RV trip. Called Mexico with Heart: Travel Tales, Photos, and a How-To Guide, it’s now at Amazon, where that link takes you.

But just a minute… I also put the full text of the book up on this website. In some ways it’s better here, as the photos are in full color and larger. To read it on the website, click on Our Mexican RV Trip on the menubar. Scroll down a little, and you can open page after page… I’ve got them all set to open in new tabs (or windows).

We had so many good times… here, I’ve just been decked out in the traditional dance apparel of a Chichameca new friend:

And here is one of the many wonderful people we met:

Our RV Travel in Mexico is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

I like it particularly  for examining the all-important layover times:

It seems that my flights to and from Guadalajara generally involve a stop en route. We did get lucky last year on a trip to San Francisco and got a mid-afternoon nonstop that got us into SFO early in the evening. Delicious! But on the way back, we had a change in LAX. Flying to Salt Lake City once took us through Las Vegas. Flying to Denver, we’ve changed in Phoenix and there are other choices too.

When you have a stopover like that, you need to allow plenty of time for it! And so you need to see the amount of times between flights. With Expedia, once you type in your two airports and the dates you want, you go to a list that shows you the flights, their prices, and the number of stopovers.

So I scroll down the list and pick a good-looking possibility. I click on “choose this flight” and then I can see exactly how long I will have between flights AND whether there is a terminal change you will have to walk or somehow navigate — with your luggage. (They do warn you that the terminal numbers might be changed themselves, but this clue is handy.)

For flying from GDL here in Mexico to anywhere I go in the US, I like to allow a minimum of two hours at that first airport. You need to get off the plane, get any checked luggage, go through customs, and find and get to where your outgoing plane is leaving from, going through TSA too of course. Plus a bathroom stop or two and maybe grabbing a snack.

I’m looking at a flight to San Francisco via Phoenix as I write this. Expedia tells me the times in the air for each leg, plus of course the starting and ending legs. I can see that I would have 2 hours and 19 minutes (did have to use my own brain cells to calculate that bit), so it would be an acceptable flight in my mind.

I’ve used other travel sites, but I do like this one. They and probably all such sites have stopped charging the surcharge on tickets ordered through them.

You can click through from the little Expedia logo on the sidebar, or here is another link to them, to a page where they give tips on green travel:

Why I Added Expedia to the Site is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

But  I’m setting up a whole bunch of articles that will automatically appear, every Friday. A friend of mine has written two about being a gay foreigner in Mexico, and she’s also written one about how surprisingly safe she and her partner felt as tourists in Mexico City. Intrepid travelers,  they were in Southeast Asia last year, and she’s written another about Mexico vs. Thailand as places to live. I have written several articles myself, and expect to write about my impressions of the US while I am there.

Leaving a Home in Mexico

It’s not a simple thing to leave your home here — specially if you have a yard, a garden, a pool, pets, or security concerns. We  have all five!

Yard, garden, and pool: the fact that we will be gone during the rainy season will make it easier on our pool guy and gardener, Roberto. Luckily he lives not far away, as he may need to check in here more frequently than he does normally. He has a large family so they can enjoy all the veggies in season!

Pets: A Canadian friend of ours will be living in the house, sleeping here every night. She knows the dogs already. Our cats are quite timid with strangers but I’m sure they will warm up to her. I will show her the cat toys! When she does go out for a while, the dogs will be in their usual spots, though at first they will probably hang out by the front gate for a few days. That’s what we’ve been told they do when we leave… oooh, this is the hardest part!

Security: I’ve written in the past that we have had a few incidents in our yard, though happily never in our house. We raised our one low wall and put sharp glass on it some time ago, we’ve beefed up the front gate, and we now have two good guard dogs — one makes up for being medium sized by being a darn good barker (sometimes too much!) and the other is a Rottweiler. Our neighborhood is generally pretty quiet, and we have quite a few friends nearby, both Mexican and foreign. So that’s handled as well as can be.

Spending Time in the U.S.

This should be interesting. It’s one thing to read the news about life up north and it will be quite another to see if our friends have been affected, and if so, how. We look forward to getting our own sense of things in a way that we can’t do from here. Most of the time, we will be based in a little place we have already rented, in the small town in Colorado where we lived for ten years before coming here.

We are not biological grandparents, but our little ahijada – goddaughter — lives there. Now three and a half, she and her younger sister were adopted here. They’ve been gone for over a year and we have sorely missed them. We expect to spend a lot of time with them. I doubt the 20-month-old will really recognize us immediately, but I lugged her around a lot in her first months, so my feel and voice may somehow ring a bell…

I will be glad to be in the US for a while, and to get a break from living in this really very different society. It does take attention!

Off to the US is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

I wasn’t surprised. These seasoned travelers have been doing this for years. They are masters of cheap travel, but I don’t mean staying in flophouses or driving junkers. They just know a lot of things that other people don’t.

When I learned that they were working on a book about their methods, I encouraged them to publish it as an ebook, and they just did! I helped them a bit with the cover design and their website setup, and I’m very proud of them for being good students!

But most of all, I’m pleased because they are making such useful information available. Here’s how they describe the ebook:

Divided into three sections…

The first part of the book uncovers the secrets to affordable travel

The second part teaches you how to be your own travel planner

And part three shows you how to find the best deals on airfares, cruises, car rentals, trains, buses, hotels, hostels and more.  We even give you a section on how you can stay all over the world for free!

I laughed out loud when I saw a place on their website where they ask:

Do you think carefully before you buy a book like this? We hope so, because savvy budget travelers are savvy spenders.

I howled because that is so like them. They are really skilled at being frugal. I’m pretty good at it myself, and I’m married to someone who is as world-class as they are. So I know it works. Kelly and I figure that we have lived a life of travel and other experiences tht most people would need to earn two or three times our modest income to pull off!

I picked up several good tips when I read Alison and Carol’s ebook.  Hmm, where to take advantage of those ideas? I’ll have to talk with Kelly about what we can afford…

Whether you are currently interested in the ebook or planning to stay home for the foreseeable future, do take a look at their website on cheap travel, and at least read some of their articles. How did they pull off that Florida trip? What about their friends who stayed in a modern adobe home in Santa Fe, complete with swimming pool, at no cost whatsoever?

Cheap Travel Made Easy: New Ebook by Friends of Mine is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We entered Mexico at El Paso / Ciudad Juarez. I still remember stopping to eat at a restaurant on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez, and feeling that otherness of being in a different country. It was both exciting and a bit daunting.

We went down through the Chihuahua desert and explored a number of cities and towns in central Mexico, before heading south to Guatemala.

Guatemala was really an adventure into another world. I loved the people and the lush beauty. This first picture was taken the day that Kelly and I crossed the border. Exhausted from all the official pettiness, including driving an extra 60 kilometers to get photocopies for the Mexican officials, we looked for a place to camp soon after entering Guatemala.

We found a secluded nook in the jungle not far off the highway — it WAS a different era! – and walked over to this home which was nearby. Their Spanish was basic, as it wasn’t their first language either, but we all communicated just fine. They assured us we were in a safe place. We took this photo and bought some eggs from them.

We soon headed up into the mountains toward the remote village of Todos Santos. On our way there, we camped on some high plains on the summit of the mountains, where Kelly did some painting. There was a spectacular thunderstorm that night.

The next day on our way down into Todos Santos, we picked up a couple who needed a ride. The guy fell asleep drunk in the back – it was Easter weekend — but we had a great chat with his young wife. She invited us to park in front of their house in the village. It was empty, as they lived somewhere else. So we did that, right on the main street, but there was no question of an RV park! The family next door was very friendly too, and invited us to plug into an electric outlet they had on their porch.

He husband continued his nap in their house and she continued visiting with us. Another torrential downpour hit, and suddenly there was a very loud noise. It turned out to be their house collapsing. Her husband was fine, and so was her pet bird; I couldn’t tell which one she was more concerned about!

As soon as the rain stopped, it seemed that most of the town turned out to see the collapsed house. Kelly took this picture from the roof of our van, after the kind neighbor suggested we pull over in front of his house. We stayed there for the several days we remained in the town.

My favorite part of Guatemala was Lake Atitlan. In gringo enclave Panajachel on its shores, we met this gray haired man — a Chilean inventor with windmills all over his land – and the other guy, a German friend of his.

We ended up using the Chilean guy’s place as our home base for a couple of weeks. I could hardly tear myself away from the view:

Eventually we wound our way back through Mexico and on home to the US. It would be some years before we went south of the border again.

The trip was often idyllic, often scary, always interesting. I’m so glad to have had the experience. Nowadays, I’m really happier at home than on the road!

Comment from the old blog:

• At February 15, 2009 3:21 PM,  Steve Cotton said…

  My parents were the adventurous travelers in our family. They made several long trips through Mexico, Guatamala, and Costa Rica. I just discovered that if my father had lived longer, he would have retired in Mexico. My mother did not share that goal. I guess I am carrying out that legacy — his, not hers.

More about that 1979 Mexico – Guatemala Trip is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

That’s the silhouette of Lake Atitlan in the background, with some Guatemalan ruins atop our van, which Kelly was driving fast across a Mexican river so the van would make it. That was after a night at a remote hot springs somewhere in the Chihuahua desert.

I wanted to buy the pottery oven I’ve put above the ruins, and when it was really too large to fit in a van already crammed with pottery and handicrafts, I took a picture of it.

Kelly, red-headed then, is lounging in the entrance to the theater in Guanajuato, and I am buying a huipil from a Guatemalan woman in Chichicastenango.

We actually came to Lake Chapala for a few days on that trip, and stayed in the old campground where the El Parque development is now.

On that trip, we often camped in remote rural spots, usually asking local people’s advice about safe places. We woke very early one morning to the van’s jiggling, thinking it was curious local children, but it was an earthquake.

Ah, the good old days. And I guess the picture proves we really are old hippies!

Mexico and Guatemala, 1979 is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Comment from the old blog:

At June 16, 2008 7:35 AM,  Anonymous said…

Members at www.homeforswap.com are doing just that. Home For Swap is a web site that allows members to exchange homes with each other. It’s a growing trend and offers many advantages over paying for a hotel room.

How it works www.homeforswap.com

First you decide where you want to vacation in the world and Home For Swap displays the home listings available in that area. After reading about the home, neighborhood, owners, amenities, and viewing detailed photos and videos, with a click of a button you private message the member and you are on your way.

HomeForSwap.com is popular because it offers a unique vacation experience. Members get to know other members, share vacation exchange advice, leave feedback, and be a part of a growing community.

When you travel to someone else’s home you also get immersed in the culture, not just the tourist areas. You meet the real people and dine at the local hot spots. If you want a midnight snack just walk down to the kitchen.

Best of all the exchange is free!

Home Exchange Program Offers Glimpses Into Expat Life in Mexico is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

While Americans will typically fly or drive their own cars in the US for long trips, Mexicans are much more apt to take buses. Not necessarily the “chicken buses” of so many stereotypes, either… a long-distance Mexican bus ride in first class or luxury class can be very pleasant, with comfortable reclining seats, a reasonably clean bathroom, movies, and so on.

In any city of any size, you just go to the large bus station and it’s like an airport, typically with local buses going from one part and long-distance ones from another. (In Guadalajara, local and long-distance buses have separate stations a taxi ride away.) You will see a variety of companies competing for your business, wherever it is you want to go. Chances are a bus is leaving pretty soon for that city. It can all be a bit overwhelming! I favor the higher class companies, in the perhaps erroneous assumption that they are likely to have better drivers.

Catching a bus from a smaller town can be a matter of going to a bus station or you may just ask around and find out where to get on the bus. When our friend Peter came to visit recently, he took the bus from Zamora, where he teaches English, to a highway intersection just outside of Jocotepec, a small city near us. Then he took a cab to our place. This was a second class bus route, no bathrooms and lots of stops, but he said it went fine. When his visit ended, Kelly took him back to that same highway intersection just beyond Jocotepec, and someone else was already standing there waiting for a bus. Peter had learned that one would come by about every half hour.

There are dozens upon dozens of Mexican bus companies. Here’s an example of the website of one that does a lot of Guadalajara routes. You can play around with possible routes and see the times and costs:

www.etn.com.mx

I know travelers who particularly like this company. Check out, for example, Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta.

Taking Long Distance Buses in Mexico is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We haven’t driven around Mexico in the rainy season before, and the countryside is beautiful, so green everywhere, with red-tile-roofed villages in the distance looking much more romantic than they generally are when you get to them! Once the rains begin in central Mexico, temperatures drop and we greatly enjoyed cooler weather than we had had in the US.

Still, part of the driving was on crowded highways, with a couple of memorable bits of more or less an hour on hilly two-lane roads where huge semis think nothing of passing continuously. It seems to be a perpetual game of chicken. I kept my eyes shut (I wasn’t driving!) as much as I could, and announced at one point that I was *never* going on another long Mexican road trip. We’ll see! It won’t be anytime soon, anyway… Nearing home, I still don’t know how the car in the lane next to us managed to avoid the befuddled-looking large dog right in front of it.

It was great to pull in our driveway about 9 PM, still in daylight. Our dear friend Roberto was there to greet us, along with his daughters who have been living in our house and caring for our dog and two cats. LarryDog was running joyously around the yard, coming back to us every few moments. The cats were in the window, waiting for us to come inside.

What a joy and a relief to be here!

There were a couple of men we didn’t know there too, working on our water system. Roberto and Kelly went over to join them, and I didn’t get the whole story till later.

We’d been stolen from, a week ago.

One or more young guys had broken our gate, used bolt cutters to remove the lock on our patio de servicio where tools are kept, and taken our two propane tanks. From here and there around the yard, they had stolen the copper tubing that brings water into the house, the electrical wiring necessary to pump water up to our big black water storage tank, and miscellaneous small fittings.

So we had neither running water nor propane. No hot showers for us.

The young women living in our house had been taking buckets of water from our pool into the bathroom to bathe and flush the toilet so we did too. The repairs the men were wrapping up restored water, and Roberto lent us a propane tank and a fitting, so this morning we got the basics reinstalled.

Evidently five houses in our neighborhood were hit, including the ones on both sides of us. This was during the day, when the women were at work and our dog was in the house. The items taken were all things that can easily be sold to get money for drugs, and that is what Roberto thinks happened. He’s already contacted local police and made a report.

Does this sound familiar? See my blog entry from January about Kelly’s tools being stolen. (This time, the tools were safe under the kitchen table.)

Our friends left about ten, and we went back and forth from our car at the bottom of our long, narrow lot to house at the top, bringing in our luggage and the various things we’d bought in the US. The family next door was out from Guadalajara and their grandchildren were playing in their yard. A couple of blocks away, a small band was practicing a tune we’ve heard them do before. The bright moonlight made our yard look even more romantic than usual. The two datura plants by the car scented the air.

It was all very Mexican, and we were home.

Comments from the old blog:

Wayne said…

Glad you made it back safely. What a drag getting stolen from. We just completed a 7 week driving tour of Mexico (you would have hated it!) and found our house broken into and our computers stolen. You certainly have the right attitude about it though. No sense crying over spilled milk. Doesn’t seem to matter what precautions you take, if a thief wants in, he will find a way. Again, welcome home!

And I said,

At least they did not get inside the house!

Back Home in Mexico: Good and Bad News is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The good highway was quite welcome as when we had driven this way a year and a half ago in the other direction, it was being working on and we had to go through one detour after another. Now there were just a few. We did pay tolls for several sections of the highway. I can be frugal about a lot of things, but the greater emptiness and quality of the cuota or toll highways make them well worthwhile.

We had heard it would be about seven hours to Mazatlan, and it took us a bit more. Late May is not really tourism season there, as it’s plenty hot and the Mexicans who come during the school summer holidays hadn’t started yet. We stayed in an old beachside hotel, and it was great to gaze at the surf from our second-floor balcony. Between undertow and rocks, the beach isn’t swimmable in that area (or in many areas by the city) so we took advantage of the pool.

Our second travel day took us from Mazatlan to Alamos, which is charming small city about 45 minutes off the main highway. Traffic was heavy on the 4-lane road. Mexico generally does not have toll roads unless there are also free alternatives, and for the later part of this day, there was no toll road and we were on the 4-lane libre or free road. Kelly made good time, weaving deftly between lanes at times, while I thought to myself, “I’m not exactly enjoying this.” But once we left Highway 15 at Navajoa and took the excellent road up into the mountains at Alamos, my spirits perked up.  We stayed in a very nice American-run B&B, and had a layover day there.

Travel Day Three got us to Santa Ana, within an hour or two of the border. Operating on the advice of one of the Americans we had met in Alamos, we didn’t try to cross in the hot late afternoon, but found a very American-style motel in Santa Ana, the San Francisco, complete with wireless internet. This day was about as long as the other two had been, but traffic was not so heavy and it was pleasant enough.

Our fourth day on the road, we crossed the border and got as far as the home of a friend in Prescott, AZ. While we were driving north, some ways north of where we had slept but still in Mexico, a warning light came on our dashboard. I looked it up in the manual and to our relief it was nothing urgent. We got it fixed in Prescott the next day.

We arrived at the place where you have your car stickers removed, some 20+ km south of the border in Nogales. It was pretty clearly marked in English, and the young woman reached past Kelly, who was in the driver’s seat, to scrape off the sticker. We gave her the piece of paper that the sticker had come in last year when we entered with the car at Columbus, NM / Palomas, Chihuahua, she gave us a receipt, and we were done.

She smiled goodbye at us. “But where do we go to get our FM-3 visas stamped that we are leaving the country?” I asked in Spanish. She waved at the larger customs entry point across the highway. If I hadn’t asked, we would have gotten out without those stamps. That happened to us once before at a different crossing, and we got scolded when we came back into Mexico. So we parked the car near her booth and walked across the not-very-busy highway to where the customs officials stamped our visas (which look like passport booklets, sort of). Noticing that we live in Jalisco one of the officials made the universal Mexican hand signal for drinking alocohol. I didn’t understand till one of the other guys explained that it was a reference to the product of the town of Tequila in Jalisco.

Nogales has two different border points. We haven’t gone through town there, but have taken the bypass route which avoids city traffic. There was nothing to do on the Mexican side, and then we were in bumper-to-bumper traffic going up to several gates on the US side. Most of the cars around us had Sonora plates and seemed to be commuters. Newpaper vendors were doing a brisk business. After a 10 to 15 minute wait, we drove up to the customs agent. He asked if we were US citizens and glanced at Kelly’s passport but didn’t bother with mine after he heard my voice. He asked if we had anything to declare, and I said we had a clove of garlic. “Any fruits or vegetables?” he asked, and I said we had some raisins. “Do you want those?” I asked. Listlessly, he said no and waved us through. As we drove away, we commented to each other that the fellow seemed depressed. His job must not be a whole lot of fun.

A few details about the trip: never was there a really scary close encounter on Highway 15 as we drove north. I was also pleased that we saw very few dogs on the edge of the highway, and only only dead one in all that distance. Our Verizon cellphone didn’t work from just outside Guadalajara till the US, as Verizon doesn’t have a mutual agreement with a Mexican cellphone company in that area.

Driving from Lake Chapala to the US Border at Nogales is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico