Mezcala, Mazatlan(beach), Thanksgiving and Brian's 47th Birthday

Time flies when your having fun.  I truly had planned on being much more prolific this past 6 months and try and update the Blog every week, but it’s just not happening.   It’s actually time to celebrate our 6 Month Anniversary of being in Mexico.  I can’t believe that we arrived here back on June 5^th and it is now December 5^th.   The time has just flown by and we are still really enjoying ourselves here.   To be honest though, the honeymoon phase appears to be complete and we are now really trying to settle in and establish our lives here.    We feel a lot more grounded and have a much better sense of how things work down here and sometimes don’t work for that matter.  Mexico is a land of mystery, enchantment, passion, fun and frustration.   Since October, we have been to Mezcala Island to visit the old fort and prison, Mazatlan to enjoy the beach and back to Central California for the Thanksgiving Holiday.

Mezcala was really cool.  The fort is where the Mexican Army held off the Spanish Invasion for almost 3 years.  Then after they surrendered, the Spanish turned it into a prison and locked up all the Mexicans that resisted. 

We had a wonderful time in Mazatlan.  We stayed for the hotel was fantastic and we just laid around and sunned ourselves all day.  The boys splashed in the pools and their favorite part was the swim up bar at 3:00pm for “Happy Hour”.  The special was Smoothies were 2 x 1 and yes they both drank two each per day.  Chocolate was Andrew and Tracy’s favorite and Zach and I liked the Mango/Strawberry flavor best.  We drove from Mazatlan, back to Guadalajara (6.5 hours) on the Tuesday before Turkey Day and flew out on the 9:30pm flight, arriving at Fresno/Yosemite National Airport at the wee hours of the morning (midnight).

Then it was off to Coarsegold, California located just outside Yosemite National Park.  We went to Tracy’s Dad’s house for the Thanksgiving Holiday.  Tracy and I had a really great time, hanging out, sleeping in, watching TV (s0mething we never get to do at home), eating a ton of food and just relaxing.  The boys on the other hand were go, go, go, up at the crack of dawn and asleep around 11:00pm.  They had such a great time hanging out with Grandpa Phil and Nana Elaine.  It was also an incredibly nice trip in that I got to celebrate my 47th Birthday in style and was taken out to a wonderful dinner to celebrate.  Thank you so much Phil and Elaine for everything.  It was a wonderful time for all of us.

We left there on the red eye on Sunday morning (1:00am) and the flight takes around 3.5 hours.  We arrived in Guad at 6:00am Sunday morning and were all exhausted.  The best part of the entire trip was the freaking 3 hours it took to get through customs, it was unbelievable!  I think every plane that was arriving into Guadalajara that day came in between 5:55am and 6:30am.  The baggage claim area had 4 carousels with at least 3 flights on each marquee.  I am guessing that there were at least 2,000 people coming in at the same time.  I guess lots of people do leave Mexico for Thanksgiving, who knew??  Exhausted and grumpy as hell, we all finally got to our car at long term parking and started home.  On the way, we were all so hungry that we stopped at a 24Hour Burrito place that tons of people stop at on the way back to Lakeside.  We went in ordered some food and then after a few minutes we were told that they were all out of chicken, beans and flour tortillas.  Still hungry and now really grumpy, we got back in the car and drove another 30 minutes.  Things all started to get a bit better once we started down the hill and could see the lake in front of us.  We stopped at a local breakfast joint and had the most amazing meal.  Tracy had eggs Benedict, I had an omelet and the boys split cottage cheese pancakes.  We were all much happier.  We arrived to our home only to find out that there had been a massive windstorm that tore through the village that night before into the morning.  The power was out in the house and the air was full of dust.  We crawled into the house and straight for the bed and napped for a few wonderful hours until the boys woke us up fighting about something.  The rest of the day, Andrew was in tears at the slightest mention of his grandpa, California or any family.  He was feeling incredibly homesick for family and just wanted to go back to the States.  Now it’s been a week and things have progressively settled back to normal.  The tears have stopped and life has begun to settle back into our nice relaxed routine.

Oh, one more exciting thing.  We think we will be moving Andrew to a new school in January.  We finally found the Waldorf School and toured it this past Thursday.  It was wonderful and Andrew was in heaven.  He actually got to stay on Thursday and Friday for the entire day and couldn’t stop talking about it all weekend.  It’s super inexpensive and the director (Veronica) is just the coolest.

So, that’s the latest from Mexico.  I hope you are all well and enjoying life and had a great holiday.  Hope to hear from many of you soon.

Adios for now!