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January 2005 — Guanajuato is a very interesting small city in the Bajio, central highlands of Mexico. At some 6700 feet in altitude, it’s got a nice climate all year. It’s certainly pleasant now, mid-January. We sleep under a quilt at night, use our motorhome heater for a little while in the morning, and wear tee-shirts, jeans, and sandals during the middle of the day. Walking back up the hill to the Morrill Trailer Park after a downtown outing in the afternoon, we get very warm! That’s partly due to the steepness of the hill we are on. Guanajuato is a city on hills, very San Francisco-like though much smaller.

We are really loving it here… so much that we will be here for a month or more–we just paid for a month’s campsite. This little trailer park (we are the only people here at present) is right in the city, within walking distance of downtown. We’ve set up Cando so that we won’t be driving it at all while we’re here.

With one laptop (connected to the internet via our satellite dish) and two people, we take turns. Right now, Kelly has gone out for a long exploration of Guanajuato’s architecture which will no doubt take him past the place that has lattes that I discovered on one of my solitary outings. It’s near the health food store I also found. I’ve got the computer to myself for several hours, tra la. After over a month of a lot of togetherness, the ease of each of us wandering around alone is very nice. Yesterday we went off together for a nice meal.

And this is a lovely setting, with hummingbirds coming by and a view over the city. Our basic practical needs can mostly be met within a couple of blocks of here — bottled water, fruits, vegetables, meat, fresh bread, and other groceries. There’s a guy who comes around in the mornings, calling out something in a musical tone. I went out and asked him what he was selling, and he said “gas.” That’s propane (or butane in many parts of Mexico, not sure which it is here), and we showed him our tanks. When one runs out, he’ll take it off to refill it. Great, that was the last of the practical items I was wondering about. We have electricity, water, and sewer here at the trailer park.

There are a lot of barking dogs at night, their barks echoing across the canyon from the hill opposite us. Both Kelly and I have been kept awake by them at times, but we are adjusting. By around 4AM, the dogs’ chorus gives way to the roosters. We hear roosters at any time but they are most marked before dawn and in the early morning, before city traffic picks up. And people’s radios. Generally, it all blends into a sweet Mexican background.

This is our third time here. In 1979, we took a Ford van all over Mexico and Guatemala, and Guanajuato was one of our favorite stops. In 1991, we came on a business trip. We flew to Guadalajara and then took buses here. Our purpose in coming was to make a video, Student Life in Mexico. While we were in Guanajuato, we met some Mexican university students and ended up shooting Mexican Pizza, an intermediate-level Spanish language program.  (I tell the story of how it came to be on that page.)

Our first day here this week, we wandered around downtown and enjoyed spotting some of the places that are in the video. Guanajuato is much the same… actually even nicer than it was before. They already had a tunnel system that keeps a lot of traffic out of the streets, and they have added to that. With the sophistication of a university town with some 20,000 students, there are countless coffee shops and economical little restaurants to explore.

I couldn’t be happier to be in Guanajuato!