Hello from sunny Mexico!

We arrived recently by car, with our 65 lb dog in the back, as well as a Weber kettle BBQ as a gift for our Mexican family here at Rancho el Rosario - and a few suitcases... But it wasn't without incident. We missed being caught in a monumental mudslide north of Los Angeles by about 2 hours. The slide completely covered the freeway and carried cars and everything else off with it. Over 200 people had to be rescued. We merely had to be diverted off of the main road and over to the coast, along with thousands of other cars during the morning commute, and then back inland south of the slide. We spent the entire day moving at 10-20 mph, drove for nearly 13 hrs with very little southerly movement to show for it. We did get off the road briefly to take our high-strung dog for a good run at the beach at one point!
The image above is not a great picture as the natural light was not in the right place when I snapped the photo, but look at the size of this HUGE sculpture (compared to the 3 people at the base) nearly installed outside of Culiacan on our last full driving day. The signage was not there yet to identify this fellow so I did some research. It is most likely an Otomi (Aztec) warrior. I was not thrilled to be in Culiacan at nightfall as we don't know the city and, honestly, it is a city known for a lot of drug cartel crime. It didn't help that as we approached town we saw maybe a dozen different policia with their lights and sirens blasting, stopping cars, questioning multiple people and snarling traffic. We stopped at the first semi-decent hotel we saw at that point and went no further. A bit later Gregg took the dog for a walk and reported back that he thought it was a DUI campaign going on ...

When we arrived in Ajijic, it was a comfort to return to our casa inside the walls of Rancho el Rosario where we have been for a couple of years doing a 6mo lease over the winter months. Please see some of my earlier posts to see what this lovely place looks like, right in town and right on Lake Chapala. Some of the infrastructure at "the Ranch" is deteriorating as it's pretty old and that has it's challenges at any given time - however, no sooner did we arrive here than they began to talk about a hurricane offshore in the Pacific. It was of epic proportion, they said, as it approached the coast due West of here. Hurricane Patricia was supposedly the most powerful hurricane ever recorded - EVER! At landfall about 130 mi from here it was expected to be a Category 5, and when it reached Guadalajara (only 30 min away) it was predicted to still be a Cat 3 with winds of over 100 mph. It was the first time I have ever been truly frightened by the proximity of a natural phenomenon that had the power to be the end ... Long story short, we escaped the wind almost entirely as the hurricane did not take the predicted sharp turn that would've put us directly in it's path, and secondly the mountains in this part of Mexico did their job and shut down what wind did make it's way our direction. There was a lot of rain, which is a big problem here in town because of the threat of slides. Don't get me started about the situation on the West coast related to Climate Change. It has changed agriculture all the way down the coast - we saw that on our drive through California. And the effect is so much more than that, but this blog is not meant to be political so I'll leave it at that.

We are in the beginning of the Dia de Los Muertos multi-day celebration here. Halloween is relatively new as a part of this. I always try to capture the many wonderful parts of the Mexican celebration of this holiday, and I'll post about that next. In the meantime, we found some great Mexican craft beer with a Dia de Los Muertos label that is very cool. It is an IPA and it's pretty good. The craft beer industry, by the way, is doing very well here.