BACK TO MY SECOND HOME

I hear the roar of the surf and taste the salt on my skin. It’s not my beloved Atlantic shore but has equally captured a part of me. People often ask the questions “From Nova Scotia, how did you end up spending your winters in Mazatlán?” and “Aren’t you afraid of living in Mexico?” My first blog will try to answer part of the first question.

In December, 2002, I took early retirement from a stressful job that was wearing me down physically and mentally. My long-time friend/soul-sister and her husband, Lorraine and Bill Johnson, were spending the winter in Mazatlán, their favourite place in all of Mexico. So, I loaded up the Boler (small trailer) and my Subaru and headed across the continent with my partner at the time. It was a camping adventure I will never forget from vistas of the mountains of West Virginia to the depths of the Grand Canyon.

However, I was not prepared for crossing the amazing Sierra Madres on our way to the coast. All was going well mechanically until we hit a tope (speed bump) in Toreón. There was a bit of damage to the trailer hitch but we thought it would be okay until we reached Maz, just a couple of hundred miles over the mountains. No one told us about the two hundred hairpin turns, large trucks surprising us as they swung into our lane from around the bend, no guard rails with drops of a mile in depth, stray pigs wandering onto the road. All this while I had visions of the trailer bursting off into the wild green depths at the side of the road.

Yes, heights make my stomach churn. Yes my knuckles were white. Yes the shot of tequila our friends had waiting for us was very welcome.

That was how I got there and by the way, there is now a super highway through the mountains that turns a six-hour-drive into two. More about why I returned yearly, later….