Going Greyhound to Mexico

Today, GoNomad posted a story I wrote about taking the Greyhound to Mexico.

Yes, that's right. I crossed the border on a bus.

Our end point was a pretty little town called Ensenada that is the heart of Mexico's wine country. It's just two hours south of San Diego on the Baja's Pacific coast.

While there, we toured a bodega, sipped some vino, downed a margarita, nibbled hot churros, and stumbled into a room where Al Capone was rumored to have played a hand of poker or two.

If you'd like to read all about it, go here:

Visiting Ensenada: A Bus Trip to Mexico's Wine Country

Also posted this week is an essay I wrote and published a few years back in the local paper. The link has been archived and hidden behind passwords, which means nobody is ever able to find it. So instead, I found it a new and approachable home.


Wanderlust and Lipstick is a web site that encourages women to get out there and travel. The site's author, Beth Whitman, actually posted two of my older travel tales.

First, What we Leave Behind, is about an encounter I had with a man on the streets of Havana.

The other, On Guard Against Giardia, is about getting sick in Guatemala.

Ixtapa in 36 Words ... Plus Photos

So I've been trying to come up with a single six-word string that might adequately sum up our Ixtapa trip into one succinct little bundle.

Can't be done.

Instead, I've come up a series of six, six-word strings that retell just a portion of the trip:

What fun! Anniversary adventure! Parasailing together!

Take off goes wrong. Wind dies.

Ten foot waves. Sucked under thrice.

Caught in ropes. Pulled to safety.

Onlookers. Big scene. Bruised. Battered. Nightmares.

Thankful: swimming lessons, each other, life.



Photos: My body bore the brunt of our tumble with the sea.

In Search of Soul

I am searching for soul.

Bright and early, tomorrow morning, hubby and I board a plane bound for Ixtapa, Mexico. It's a quickie of a trip, one of those all-inclusive deals, which is -- not at all -- my cup of tea.

But hubby researched it, talked up an agent and plunked down the dough all on his own in honor of our fourth anniversary.

When I learned the price he paid included everything we'd need for our time away (every meal, every drink, every transport), I got a little steamed. There was no wiggle room for discovering our very own favorite Ixtapa spot. We had no need to ever leave the grounds of the corporate-owned resort!

Surely, after all the travel he's done with me, hubby knows how I feel about these sorts of package trips. In fact, four years ago we'd come to huge blows over another trip just like this.

Good man that he is, he was trying to plan our honeymoon to a pretty beach somewhere. When I caught wind of his plan (he gave me some brochures), I flipped out, refused to go and commandeered the situation. I did. not. go. on package trips.

I took total control of our honeymoon (I gave out my credit card info before even showing him the spot), and we ended up in a small, family-owned hotel comprised completely of thatched huts on a beach in Belize.

So the fact that I'm going on this all-inclusive Ixtapa vacation (this blog posting being my only rant about the packaged-ness of it all) is impressive. For me, it is a practice in restraint. I'm considering it evidence of my emotional growth as a married woman. I have allowed my husband to plan a trip for me, even if it isn't the trip I would have planned. I have released my "travel control."

And yet, as soon as I learned we were going, I headed straight for my Mexico Guide, determined to find something "unique" to do in Ixtapa.

I was horrified -- and I do mean horrified -- to find that the book actually described the town as "soulless."

Ixtapa, it said, was never a sleepy village, never a sweet spot that real people called home. There is, therefore, nothing organic about the place. It was planned entirely by the Mexican government and a computer program during the 1970s to be the ideal tourist resort.

When I read this, I almost panicked. Then I breathed. I remembered that I was practicing the release of my "travel control."

So I am going. But I refuse to take the guidebook at face value. I will find some Ixtapan soul.


Photos from a "no-package" tour of Mexico:
Top - Morelia
Bottom - San Miguel de Allende