Mexico
One Stubborn Dog and a Mexican Goat (Drive Day 31 minus 14 years)
I’ve arrived at a heat threshold: 90 degrees. That’s the limit above which we can’t sleep inside the tin can that is our camper. In Santa Teresa Tehauntepec at 5pm the thermometer inside the Avion says 104 degrees so we take Wipeout for a walk and hope it cools off by nightfall.
If I can get heatstroke in Mexico, maybe my dog is susceptible too. Otherwise why would she pick this particular animal to challenge, head-on? I barely get out my camera in time, I’m laughing so hard. And then she charges the goat again. The sound of thick skulls smacking literally bounces through the papaya grove. I’ve always known Wipeout has more beauty than brains. But exactly one month into this road trip she proves she is as stubborn as the woman who insists on traveling with a gun.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
The Great Mezcal Coverup (Drive Day 30 minus 14 years)
Say hello to Martin Garcia. He’s the reason Gary is not spending tonight in jail. He’s a world-class meszcalero with zero marketing budget so he flags down customers driving out of the Oaxaca valley. We stop and taste the best mezcal from a donkey-powered roadside still I’m ever likely to. We buy a jug, or rather we empty a pickle jar and he fills it: he doesn’t have much in the way of merch either.
Fast forward a few hours driving through semi-desert heat, a couple of nasty topes and a road block. Scary looking Federales are searching for weapons and I have a gun hidden under the camper’s carpet. Luckily that carpet is now soaked in old-dog urine and the contents of a pickle jar of mezcal that must have fallen out of the cupboard when we hit a tope. For the rest of this story, you’re going to have to read the book.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
The Mother of all Street Dances (Drive Day 29 minus 14 years)
Not everyone can afford tickets to the official amphitheater dances of Guelaguetza, so in the gift-giving spirit of the festival’s name, dancers take their daily performances to the streets. Marching bands provide the beat and proud parents pour homemade mescal straight from dried out vegetable gourds to the spectators.
Oh and if you’re sober enough to be standing by nightfall, there’s this. And then more dancing. It’s going to be hard to drive away from Oaxaca.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
A dog and her entourage (Drive day 28 minus 14 years)
Oaxaca’s famous Guelaguetza festival is in full swing and the campground listed in our guidebook is full. Which turns out to be a good thing, because the overflow crowd gets to camp in a field of agave plants up in the hills and sample the owner’s El Scorpion mescal.
Which is where Wipeout decides to hang out for our entire stay in Oaxaca. It’s a comfortable 74 degrees at 5,368 feet. She doesn’t need the crowds or the festival, she IS the party up at the campsite. With her girl Celeste at her side, she’s the mayor of San Felipe.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Oaxacan wonders (Drive Day 27 minus 14 years)
It’s possible to be so mesmerized by the contemporary art of Oaxaca that you stumble from outdoor market to gallery to ceramics co-op in a daze. But when Juan Alcazar sees us gape-mouthed in front of his studio he just wipes his hands on his painter’s smock and invites us in for a tour.
He tells us his culture holds that a spirit animal is born at the same time we are, and he paints the moment, later in life, when we meet and recognize each other. His women have haunting, elliptical eyes and their skirts hide shadowy jaguars or swarming bees. But it is a painting of a red bull charging through wind-bent trees that we can’t walk away without. There are no walls to hang paintings in the Avion, so we find the nearest DHL and ship it to Gary’s mother in Wisconsin. Before we become too attached.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
The blind singer and the wailing woman (Drive Day 26 minus 14 years)
The tin can says he takes requests. “Conoce La Llorona?” I ask if he knows the ballad of the wailing woman, doomed to eternal tears for drowning her two children. Which, most versions of the Mexican legend point out, she did to get back at a cheating man.
The famous blind singer of Oaxaca smiles, touches my arm to make sure I mean it, then begins the haunting ballad that still sends chills down my husband’s spine. Gary was visited by La Llorona once, at night next to a body of water, and to this day believes it was only my intervention that saved him from freezing to death.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Off book again and blissfully ignorant (Drive Day 25 minus 14 days)
Why is it that not knowing the name of this little locked-up chapel makes me so happy? I can’t find any reference to it in guidebooks or my mother’s journal. It feels dropped from the sky, a reward for taking the time to stop and admire it. Gary even forgives the prickly pear cactus he sits on while capturing this photograph. We’re back on un-schedule.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Cholula – no not the hot sauce (Drive Day 24 minus 14 days)
Wipeout is uninterested in climbing to the top of the largest preindustrial building ever erected on earth, as the impressive ruins atop ruins at Cholula are described in our guidebook. So we set up the awning for shade and she guards what is probably Cholula’s largest postindustrial house on wheels.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Welcome to Mexico, have a tope (Day 23 minus 14 years)
North America calls them speed bumps, but Mexican topes are more like organ-bruising fractures in up-thrust asphalt. They greet drivers entering every town along every road that doesn’t charge a toll. Even slowing to first gear and gingerly summiting these torturous peaks isn’t gentle enough for a vintage camper; the Avion harrumphs and clatters with indignation. The jagged crack in our slowly disintegrating plastic water tank portends recycled water drums in our future. Eight hours and we barely make Cuernevaca by nightfall. We’re trying to get to Oaxaca before the campground there fills with tourists for its famous yearly festival. But this sticking-to-a- schedule thing deflates the joy of wandering.
I know Gary is feeling it too. He’s starting to peel the bugs and butterflies from the truck’s grille and sketch them in his journal. Tonight’s victim? An orange-barreled Sulphur butterfly, preserved for eternity in colored pencil. Oh and it’s 73 degrees and 6,798 feet in elevation.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Mock your elders (Drive day 22 minus 14 years)
Normally I’d chuckle at the antics of little boys pantomiming the aches and pains of their elders in an elaborate folk dance. But I’m rapidly becoming gimpy myself. I’m blaming it on hoisting an 80-pound dog in and out of a camper, the back-jarring road to Patzcuaro and hips stiff from folding into a bench seat hours at a time. Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with spontaneously dancing barefoot on tile yesterday…
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom my teresabrucebooks.com website landing page or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
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