Mexico

The flight to El Paso was uneventful. However, for the sake of travel tradition, the train at the Dallas airport broke down for a few minutes so I would feel more at home. Cecilia and her husband were waiting for us at the airport. I was a bit concerned that we wouldn't have enough room in their car for all of our luggage, but they recognized the overage of American materialism and brought the Suburban.

To go into another completely hypothetical situation, suppose that the border might have proved to be slightly problematic. Not to point fingers, but we might have had an issue where one of us that had been to Mexico, had left without getting her passport stamped and was going to owe approximately $4,000 in back charges. (Note to self: Either get stamped leaving Mexico or don’t ever come back.) If this completely hypothetical situation might have happened, I imagine that to deal with it we would have potentially needed to have our “guide” use a lot of Spanish along with hand gestures and pleading. However, in the spirit of what seems to keep happening in this blog, let me embellish the story as of course this would never happen in reality -- there might have been some exchange of funds that seemed to ease the process and we passed on without much incident.

We checked into the hotel (nice) and went for a traditional Chihuahua meal. We went to a place with the same name as the ranch in Bonanza, which was covered with the heads and bodies of exotic animals from around the world that the owner had hunted and killed. (From hippos to lions, leopards to crocodiles). We had a lot of great food that I would misspell. We had a cheese with peppers and sausage in real tortillas. (The tortillas were a great corn instead of flour). We had wonderfully flavored steak, with guacamole, and enchiladas.

We also learned some key Mexican terminology:
Mild or Might be Spicy = Hot
A Little Spicy = Very Hot

There was also another term called “Spicy” of which I am unsure of the translation as it made it to my vicinity only to burn my nose hair. I did not try “Spicy”.

After dinner, we went to a Mexico City style ice cream place where I had flower ice cream and rose petal ice cream. My lovely wife had been talking about the ice cream for as long as I have known her (7 years) – and it was good to finally have some.