93.13: ROAD TO MEXICO CITY: July 2008

July 14, AM, Hotel San Luis Potosi.

• We're headed north, fleeing really, a heroic day of driving, sticking to the toll roads, should get us to San Antonio on Monday night. Tonight.

• Pictures are from Sunday, July 13, Mexico City.

• We started the day by going up above it all to a place called Desert of the Lions. It's a national park. The drive up was a two hour grind. It would wrong to describe it as bumper to bumper. That would suggest that people line up and play follow the leader. Bumper to door. Door to mirror. Pass you on the speed bump. Pass you back, you jerk. The fool in the red car needed to go over each speed bump diagonally. What was he thinking when he bought that low slung thing in Mexico?

• The park may have been beautiful once, but it is a mud hole now. Mud surrounded by vendors.

• The ride down offered some pretty spectacular views. But we got hopelessly lost in the city. It defeated me.

• One crowning achievement of Mexico City is their park system. Chepultepec Park is where we stopped for a picnic and some sanity. Possibly my one best impression of all in Mexico City is this HEB (grocery chain) brand peanut butter sandwich, spread with a finger, washed down with bottled water, in a grassy oasis. We tossed the basketball around, and then playtime was over.

• Another Perspective: Mexico City is architecture. That, and monumental art on every major intersection. You could spend weeks just seeing the city from that angle. We didn't have weeks or days even, only minutes, so we snapped a lot of pictures and plunged ahead.

• The horses are wearing boots. Just one of the curious things that caught Hannah's eye. Four of a kind, VW Bug taxis. Our mud spattered pickup.

• She also snapped about 200 arm's length pictures of herself. It's a girl thing I'm told. Fernanda, the girl we met in Cancun on the scuba trip laughed and confessed to the same behavior. Maybe it's universal?

• Every red traffic light brings you a battalion of street vendors, all trying to make eye contact, selling whatever. Some, dressed in clown-face, do a 40 second juggling act for their captive audiences. Then they walk the lanes, hat in hand.

• Follow me: The picture of the back of a Chevy is the only one we have of a very wonderful man. At a gas station I showed him the map book opened to the Mexico City page and asked "Donde?" (where?). He adjusted his glasses and poked a ham finger down on our exact location. After a labored 5 minute conversation that included a lesson in how to better utilize our map book, he said, "Follow me." At least four times in our trip someone has gone out of their way to help us find ours. One guy walked us 2 blocks in the rain and pointed down the next block to the hotel, not the one we were looking for it turned out, but to a less expensive one and better too.

• As we drove out of town the world put on a light show: lightning, clouds with silver linings, a rainbow. Good Job.