Lunch

Buenas tardes.

There is not a cloud in the sky. The air is dead and very hot. I was up at five am, watering, painting, sweeping dead bugs and ants off the concrete, washing dishes, and asleep in a chair by noon.

Senor went to play bridge and I was still asleep. I did not hear him leave.

I wanted to post a new photo of the street side of the adobe wall and the gate and show you how the bougainvillea, trumpet vine and feugo trees are flowing over the edge of the wall, but Senor always locks me in with the gate key when he plays bridge. I stood at the gate thinking someone would walk by and I could get them to unlock me, but after fifteen minutes I bagged it, came into the bedroom, turned on the ac and said, manana.

I thought today would be a huge workday around here, but it was not. The first door is ready to go up, but the walls need a final white washing and the cement floor needs to go in. I thought putting up one door would be so simple............not.

Senor says I don't understand the sequence of events nor the timing of events.

Umberto came around seven to say he has the grippe and can't work. He quit early on Saturday because it was his fifty first birthday. But last year he told me it was his fifty first, so my guess is sometime between celebrating on Saturday and Sunday, he realized he was a year off and needed to celebrate Monday, too.

Senor went to the hardware store twice, but I did not see him come back with anything. He went to the store twice and came back with a coke and a gatorade.

Well, there you have Monday morning.

So now I will tell you about yesterday's morning.

I suggested that we go to Topolobampo. South about two and a half hours and then half an hour west of Los Mochis, it is the second deepest sea port in the world. Its main industry is shrimping and then, whatever is coming off the huge freighters in the harbor.

So we hopped in the truck like everyone else and headed to the sea.

Fortunately I got to ride inside and not in the bed like most and while the guidebooks all say Topolobampo is kind of a nothing place, we enjoyed it very much.

The little town is built into the hillside and most houses look onto the sea or into tiny hillside alleyways.

There is very little black ironwork here, most of it is painted bright white or blue. Many of the houses appear to share small courtyards and along the seaside they are built wall to wall.

This is a popular spot for catching the Baja ferry to La Paz, which leaves in the night and takes a little over five hours to cross the sea. We saw a lot of Mexicano tourists, but not another foreigner in town.

In addition to shrimp boats, ferries, small yachts and motor craft, there are many lanchas like the ones below and huge freighters from Hong Kong in the port. I lost my photos of two tugboats trying to get a gigantic freighter into position.


We walked up and down the hillsides, checked out the souvenirs, which were all imported from China, and finally settled on Chicho's for a shrimp lunch.

On the drive home Senor said it was an awfully long way to go for lunch...................