A Man And His Goat
At the end of our two-month test of living in Guadalajara, Mary and I packed up my car for the drive back to Wisconsin.
We left Guadalajara early one Saturday morning driving north on highway 54. The region north of Guadalajara is very mountainous and incredibly rugged. The highway is in good condition, but the road quickly becomes very serpentine with switchback after switchback ascending and descending the sides of mountain after mountain. Mary started oohing and aahing over the spectacular vistas around every corner. Then she would quickly remind me to keep my eyes on the road. I still snuck a quick peek every now and then when the road would straighten out a little bit, but mostly I was enjoying cornering around the curves.
After a hundred miles or so we came out of the mountains and settled into normal driving. We were tooling along quite well until we came to an intersection where the road we were following was blocked off by road cones. There were, of course, no detour signs in sight. I took one of the alternate roads toward a nearby town while Mary whipped out one of her Sanborn’s travel guides, which we had received with our Mexico car insurance.
According to the book, we would be able to hook up with the road we wanted in the town. We followed the book’s directions until the street we were following dead-ended with a road construction barricade. We tried detouring around, but quickly got lost. Some cab drivers sitting on the back of a taxi gave us directions, but we wound up turning around in a cow pasture. We backed up and once more tried following the directions. We came to another dead end where several young men were conversing around a pickup truck with a goat tied in the back of it. Maybe the owner was trying to rent out the goat by the hour. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, I was good and ticked off.
Mary rattled off some Spanish trying to get new directions, but I could tell that she was just getting more confused by the answers. One of the young men offered to show us the way by driving the truck (with goat) ahead of us. We quickly took him up on his offer, following him back out of town.
As we were following, Mary marveled at the generosity of the young man, saying how very rare it would be for someone in the States to offer such help without asking for any kind of payment. I suggested that we should make our appreciation tangible by offering a few pesos for the guy’s gasoline and time and so we did. When the young man pulled over to the side of the road and indicated that we were now home free, Mary handed him two twenty peso notes. The smile on his face let us know that we were leaving behind a very happy camper.
As we drove further north, we encountered a forest of Joshua trees. If you’ve never seen one, go look for a picture because they are probably the weirdest looking plant you will ever see. They kind of look like a tree trunk with a small mop of green hair at the top. Often they sprout branches at what seem to be random locations along the trunk with each branch having its own green mop. They also have this small “veil” that hangs down and seems to be some kind of reproductive organ. The forest went on for mile after mile.
Mexico doesn’t seem to enforce any speed laws in the countryside, so we sailed along at a leisurely eighty-five miles an hour. You can safely do this in Mexico because most Mexicans are good drivers (I think most of the bad ones die early in traffic accidents). Suddenly a coyote ran out of the ditch on to the roadway in front of us. Seeing there was no oncoming traffic, I swerved partly into the other lane hoping for the best and waiting for the thump. How the human mind can observe and react so fast, I don’t know. There was no thump, and looking in the rearview mirror I could see a very confused looking coyote trying to figure out what in hell had just happened.
We finally arrived in Saltillo and found a room for the night. Next we went out looking for a restaurant. The motel manager gave us directions, but it wasn’t our day because we couldn’t find it. We saw a McDonalds, but we figured we would get enough of that once we crossed the border. Finally we spotted a restaurant attached to a sports bar, but once we parked the car we found that it was locked up.
Mary and I wandered into a courtyard leading toward the bar section where we came upon a young man. Mary started rattling off in Spanish to him. The guy said the restaurant opened at 7:00. Mary pointed at her watch, which said 7:05. The guy said the restaurant would soon open, so Mary and I went back to the gated entrance. After waiting for a few minutes, the gate was opened by the young man we had just talked to! Why he didn’t come right out and tell us that he worked there and would open the gate for us was something that not even Mary could figure out.
We sat down at a table in the “Painted Cow” and the young man served us a pretty good meal of tacos and flautas. We returned back to our motel and got a good night’s sleep. The next day we crossed back into the US where I set about selling my house.