Kaitlin and I left for our first vacation since Tucker was born, six years ago, on the 30th. I’m currently writing from the airport in Mexico City, waiting to board our (new) flight. We missed our initial (oof).
The trip was initially planned around Kaitlin’s friend that was getting married in San Miguel de Allende. The wedding was cancelled for what seems to be same family issues about traveling to Mexico, COVID, yada yada. I hear the nuptials took place in the states in a more intimate setting.
But we were going regardless. Six years is a long time to wait for a solo vacation free from kids. And my mom was coming up from Florida to watch the mongrels for five days (thanks, Mom!!!).
Life has been busy, so beyond hotels and a car rental we’d done absolutely zero research or planning for the trip. It didn’t matter really but there were some things that caught us off guard.
The big one was finding vegan friendly eats in Mexico City. Usually Mexican food is easy for us. Rice, beans, veggies… no problem. Apparently veggies aren’t prolific here and rice and beans don’t seem to be the staple Americans assume they are in Mexico.
The other surprise was the language barrier. Very few people spoke much, if any, English. Luckily Kaitlin has a great memory and was able to tap into some 10 years of middle school and high school Spanish classes that she didn’t pay much attention in. It was enough to get us by along with us picking up a few things here and there and leaning on Google translate when absolutely necessary.
Combine the lack of vegan options and the language barrier and finding suitable food was tough. But when we did it was fantastic. Definitely some of the best Mexican food we’ve ever had.
After two days in Mexico City we drove 3.5 hours across the countryside in our (manual transmission) rental car to San Miguel de Allende for two more days before heading back to Mexico City for our last night. I’ll write about San Miguel tomorrow. It was an interesting town but ultimately not for me.
We’ve been in the airport for about seven hours now. Our flight leaves in another two. Apparently, if you don’t check in at least an hour before your flight here it is “closed”.
That was fun.
So instead of going through Atlanta and then home to Detroit by 10:30pm today we’ll be flying to JFK, having to get our butts to the Newark airport, and then taking the 6am flight to Detroit to arrive home tomorrow morning around 7:30am.
Then we need to scramble and get to a loan closing for our latest rental by 11am.
Life is nuts.