Royal Roadtrip: Day 1

We’ve been meaning to write this post for a little while, but still keep avoiding it.  I think it’s because it really truly means we’re leaving and ready to go.  We’ve had such an amazing time, and it sucks a bit to admit it’s all done.  But then again, we’re ready to come home.  We’re excited to get back to Airdrie and see what God wants for us there.  We’re wondering what all has changed there since we left.

So without much more blah, blah, blahing, here’s what we’re going to miss and not miss about Tlaxiaco and Mexico.

[wanna hear something funny?  We started this post 4 days ago, got distracted and never got back to it.  I think we still didn’t want to finish it off. )

Resuming, and also changing gears.  Let’s just quickly do this:

Miss: food, friends, so much God time

Not Miss: unable to flush toilet paper, topes, language difficulties

Now onto the real action!

Chelsey, Jared and I have just finished the first day of our marathon trip home to Airdrie.  We decided to call it the “Royal Roadtrip” as my daughter is a princess, son a prince and therefore I AM THE KING.  Yes, it required bold letters.

We’re staying in the Holiday Inn, Centro Historico in Queretaro.  Swanky does not describe how nice this place is.  The price for the room wasn’t bad, but they sure made up for it at supper!  400 pesos for 3 of us to eat?  It was 2 lasagnes and a burger.  Dang, that’s more than we spent on tacos for 6 people a couple nights ago.

The pool here was super warm, so we spent an hour in it.  The internet is stinking fast, at least compared to what we used in Tlaxiaco, so I’m downloading episodes of the Simpsons.  I’m happy.

As far as the road trip, this was the day I most worried about.  It was a route I had never been and I never felt like I had good directions.  But wow!  Did God ever stick with us.  The route was perfectly like our map showed us, even better.  Sure, one highway had a different number, but it went the same way.  We drove about 700 km’s and took 10.5 hours in total.  Not bad considering that time included all of our rest stops.

Only two things really stand out about the day, besides how amazingly good the kids were.

First, we had prayed that our overloaded van would not have any problems on topes.  It’s a lowrider as it is and with all that weight in it we were expecting to scrape half our exhaust system off.  But we only scraped slightly twice.  And the one tope that I completely didn’t see and hit at full speed and caught hang time from?  It shifted our load pretty good but the van didn’t scrape at all.  Cool.  We had prayed for God to assign a few angels to lift us over the bumps, and I guess He answered!

The other thing was finding a place to eat lunch.  One of the things I like about driving through the US and Canada is the ease of finding a fast food place along the highway.  Mexico doesn’t really have that.  See it’s nice because you can see the golden arches or similar from a ways off, or there are signs telling you they’re coming.

But in Mexico, there are no warnings.  And no familiar restaurants that you know what you will get when you order, even if it is garbage (I’m looking at you double Quarter Pounder).  So when you’re trying to find something to eat, you find yourself scanning all over the place, judging every building for cleanliness (which is silly in Mexico) and by the time you see something decent you’re passed it.

Today we were getting pretty hungry and were doing the above procedure in the city of Pachuca.  Finally I saw a place that said it had meat and fish.  So we stopped.

I have a very strong rule about eating seafood: only next to the ocean.  Pull up google maps and find Pachuca.  Do you see an ocean near it?  Nope, didn’t think so.  Almost all of the restaurants in Pachuca though are seafood ones though.  Odd.  But this one was supposed to have meat of some other kind than fish.

We sit down, get the menu and see that, yup, all fish.  Crap.  So we order the only thing that we really know on the menu: shrimp quesedillas.  The waiter is a little shocked that’s all we want, but accepts it.  When it comes, it looks more like a deep fried empenada instead of what we know as a quesedilla.  But we eat it.  Well, I eat mine.  Chelsey has one and takes the other one to the van (they’re not that big) and Jared has one bite and says he’s full.  Yup, these are my royal kids.  Apparently not as hungry as they thought.  (thankfully these were deep fried so I think that would have killed any bugs or yuckies that could make as sick.)

So that’s that.  Tonight is our last night in Mexico, although Laredo, Texas is pretty much Mexico!  Tomorrow’s drive should be a lot easier from what I hear.  No mysterious highways to look for, we pretty much stay on the same one all day.  Just have to get around Monterrey but that is pretty easy I guess.

Michelle and Katria headed to Oaxaca this afternoon and will be flying into Calgary tomorrow evening.  So they will be home right away!

Thanks all for your prayers.  We’ll write some more tomorrow evening from Texas!

Ryan, Chelsey and Jared.