Filed under: Ajijic, General Update, Greg Collett, Hiking, Lynne Green, Travel Storys
We’re down to 12 days left staying here at the ranch in Ajijic. It’s been 18 months since we got here. In some ways it feels like we’ve been here forever, in others, like we just got here. We’ve gone through two ‘Snow Bird’ seasons, a rainy season, time together and time apart. We headed out from Toronto in October 2009 looking for adventure and, we found it. Overall, what a great time this has been.
We’ve met a lot of folks who have the same sort of adventures spirit that we have, and we’ve got some tips on some other cool places to go.
As we sit here now, there is just one couple left to fly out of here, Thee are two women going to be living here full time. Most of the Snowbirds are returning again next year. Our summer plans are that Lynne will hang out at the house in Newmarket most of the summer. I’ve got a 6 week night school course in motorcycle maintenance. That ends on the first of June. Weather depending, I hope to head out west on the bike for a bit then. My plan is to get to Calgary to visit my daughter Christine and the grandkids, then continue on to Victoria. I’ve been reading some blogs of people who have biked across the country. Several have continued up north and done Alaska too. The idea is tempting. I expect I’ll think about that leg after I get out west.
I need to be back in Newmarket for late July to get out to Lake Placid on the weekend of the 24th. I think this years Ironman is going to be a blast. Bryan, Andy and Vickie are the only people that I know of who are participating this year. Bernie and I are volunteering as peelers. Most of the rest of the gang are planning on coming down to watch, train and some to sign up for the next year. I’m really looking forward to that weekend.
We’ll both be home for a few weeks after that but we’re planning on doing the Camino walk in Spain starting in mid September. The walk is a bit under 800k and should take 4 to 5 weeks. We’re booking our return flight for 8 weeks after we arrive. From the stories we’ve read, there are a ton of folks who have done the walk and have had to push though rain because they had to get to the airport for their return flights home. Neither of us can think of anything fun about hiking in the rain so, we’ll hang in wherever we are when the weather’s bad. We’ll spend whatever time we have left after the hike in Portugal.
We’d like to be back home over Christmas this year. I haven’t seen my Mom or the kids over Christmas for two years now so, I want to spend Christmas with them all this year.
We really have no idea of what’s going to happen after Christmas. We may have blown the budget with our summer and fall plans and have to lay low for a bit. I’m thin king that it would be cool to fly down to Panama (Bouquette) where we’d started out towards when we headed out originally. We’re still pretty happy that we’ve been lucky enough to adventure around the way we have so far.
With only 12 days until we leave, we’re getting a bit anise to get going but, our friends Rona nd Bev and coming here for a week, arriving this Saturday night. We had a great time with them last year here and we’re looking forward to expiring another couple of towns with them and just hanging out. The one town I hope we get to is Tequila. It’s about a 3 hour drive from here and I think doing the tour there will be a blast. I’ll post pictures from there if we do that trip.
We’ll pack up the car the same day that Ron and Bev leave and then head out the next morning. 2 days should get us across the border and into San Antonio where we’re going to spend a couple of nights and then, we’re thinking of just fast tracking it home. I’m guessing we’ll be back by around the 20th or so. Here’s hoping it’s bike riding weather when we get back!
Filed under: Ajijic, Fitness, General Update, Greg Collett, Hiking, Motorcycle in Mexico, Travel Storys
Wow – it’s been a whole month since I’ve updated this blog. I haven’t gone anywhere near that long in the last 5 years without updating. I’m working on a book so, I guess that takes away my need to type!
This year feels so different from last year. I guess that when we got here we were feeling so excited to be heading out on this huge adventure and we’d landed in a ‘far and distant land’. The language was different, the sky’s were blue, the temperature was perfect. It felt like everyone we met was doing almost the same sort of adventurous thing. Now, the freshness and excitement is gone. The weather is still great and the sky’s are still blue. The vegetation on the mountains changes all the time, but, we walk the same old roads, (there are only a few) we’re looking at the same old things. The fun of going to the store and trying to figure out what these different food are has switched slowly to “I’d give my right arm to spend 30 minutes in a Loblaws!” I went out to buy a couple of clear 60 watt light bulbs the other day. I found them in the second store, but, they were behind the counter so the girl had to get them for me. It took forever for this idiot to stop removing every 60 watt frosted bulb from the shelf and grab a clear one from the bunch that were 12 inches away. Yup – the fun factor is starting to wear thin.
Last year on the ranch, we almost never saw anyone around except for at happy hour. This year, half the folks are different and it’s impossible to lay outside in the sun during the day without someone coming over to talk. I need that shirt back that Steve had embroidered for me one year that read “I don’t play well with others”. Lynne keeps yelling at me to be nicer to people.
I wonder if I’m too young to be in this sort of semi retirement place. I was pretty lucky back home to get into this athletic thing. Almost everyone was younger than I. Many were 10 – 15 years younger and everybody was out training like maniacs with amazing goals ahead. I was pretty lucky to hang with that gang. Here now, it seems like most folks are 5 – 20 years older than us, and much more sedentary than I want to be. I feel a bit like I’m fighting a clock here. It’s almost time to get out of Dodge! We’re leaving in the middle of April. I wouldn’t be surprised if we came back here one day again, but I think we both have a lot of exploring and adventuring to do for the next while.
Lynne and I are planning to walk the Camino de Santiago, a 800k hike through the Pyrenees mountains in Spain this fall. I’m not sure how much hiking we’ll be doing on a daily basis back in Newmarket so, we’ve started walking daily here. We started last month and walked our way up to 70+K per week already. We’re planning on mixing things up a bit in that we’re going to do our Malecone 8k walks a couple of mornings a week, we’ll hike the mountains a couple of mornings and do a 15 – 20+k walk with weight in our knapsacks on the Sundays. It feels good to have an athletic goal ahead of me again. It’s not as intense (there’s an understatement) as Ironman training, but, it’s OK. I’ve ‘been there and done that’ – got the shirts the medals and the tat – now I’m old. you know those really old 70+ year old guys you see at marathons and triathlons? Yea – that’s not me! 
The book is coming along OK. I gave 45 pages or so to Lynne last night to read. Apparently I should have paid much more attention to my grade 6 grammar teacher! I was really hoping she would be so excited about it but, who am I kidding. I’m not a writer and not a big reader. If I can pump this out as best I can and then Lynne and I edit it, I think it will be pretty good. hopefully, we don’t kill each other while we edit together!
I made contact with Jeff, one of Lynnes cousins who is a very successful speaker in the US who has agreed to take me on and tutor me in how to market this book and get my butt out on the speaking circuit. I think that will be a blast. God knows I love talking to groups and there’s nothing more exhilarating than the curtain going up! I’m going to have to work hard at not dropping the “F” word all the time though!
There is a couple coming tomorrow to buy the last 2 puppies. I wonder if “Puppy” is the right word anymore. They are 6 months old now and, I weighted one this morning at 41 pounds. It’s OK, I didn’t hurt my back! We’re lucky that we’ve found good homes for all of them and, the two females left on the ranch are both fixed. I hate seeing them go, but feel good that they are safe and going to be well looked after. I have an incline that raising dogs would be a cool thing to do if I settle down back in Ontario one day.
I’m waiting to hear back from John with the HSBC series about some available dates for me to do some race announcing again this summer. I’m excited about that. That job is a hoot. I want to do a fair bit of riding this summer as well. Hopefully the announcing gigs will leave me with time to get out to the Rockies at some point and time. I haven’t seen my daughter Christine in way too long now. I want to get to Calgary ASAP after we get back. I’ll probably do an Ottawa run first to see Michelle and Gavin first though. I’ll feel safer getting a few miles on that bike within driving distance to home again. It’ll be great to ride a bike that doesn’t just get me there, but gets me back too! That little Vento bike I had here was great for a one way trip! It’s gone now. I sold it for what I bought it for. I’m out the cost of the repairs but, all in all, I had a ton of fun and a number of great adventures on it. I’ve got the x-rays to prove it too!
We have company coming for a few days in mid February, someone coming for the month or March and friends coming for a week and a bit in April. Hopefully, we’re still friends with the month-long visitor at the end of the visit. If nothing else, that should add a new and exciting dimension to the month and, to the 18 month Mexican adventure that we’ll be finishing!
It’s 1:00 pm here. I’ve got one afternoon left to play with the pups! Good luck with that cold and snow back home gang. Congratulations on completing 50 marathons by 50 Zora. A great goal, and a great accomplishment! I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone back in Lake Placid this summer. If you’re going to be there, don’t mit the tag team effort of Bernie and I ripping rubber off of every passer by at the end of the swim!
Lynne and I have started our training early for our walk through Spain this fall. Here’s the data from day 1 – We’re looking to walk 280k this month. Usually 8k a day for 6 days a week and 20k on the Sunday.
4x Malecone by gregcollett at Garmin Connect – Details.
Filed under: Ajijic, General Update, Greg Collett, Hiking, Pets, Travel Storys
In some ways, lots has happened since our last update. In other ways, not much really.
From Dallas we drove through to Laredo where we spent the night before crossing the border. Both the US and Canadian travel warnings tell folks not to drive across the Mexican border. They say if you have to go to Mexico, fly in to the middle somewhere. We want to bring our stuff back with us when we return in April so, we need the car. The girl at the car insurance office told us that she usually has lineups of people buying insurance before driving into Mexico but, as of when we were there, we were only about the 3rd policy they’d written so far, this year! She went on to tell us stories of why non of them go across the border anymore. Non of this helped us much with our nervousness of crossing in the morning. We’d decided to cross about 9:00 AM. My thinking was that the ‘bad guys’ stay up wrecking havoc under the cover of darkness and should be asleep until noon. Neither one of us got much sleep that night.
In the end, all of our worries were for not. The border crossing went smoothly and we were well on our way after getting out of the customs office with Lynne’s visa and our sticker for the car. I got my 5 year visitor status a while ago.
The drive from Nuevo Laredo (the Mexican side of the town) to Ajijic was uneventful. We stayed out one night and arrived here in the middle of the afternoon on the Wednesday afternoon, just a couple of hours late for the weekly market that takes over our street in town.
It felt good to be back. Not as exciting as it had been last year. We felt the same way about the trip down here. Last year was very exciting and all new. This year it was, well, it was just work getting here. We’d done the tourist thing in Nashville, Memphis and Dallas which we enjoyed, but the rest of te 4500k trip wasn’t much fun at all.
Great to see our friends from last year, Paul and Kay from the east coast when we got here. The pups all came running which was pretty cool for me. They looked skinny which bugged me a bit. I’d left 5, 13k bags of dog food for them before I left. I guess the folks on the ranch fed all the dogs with that. Now (3 weeks later) they are pretty fat again. The owner here had given “Moose”, the biggest male to his boyfriend just before I’d gone back home and somehow the guy managed to let it die in the 5 weeks I’d been away. The owner gave him another one so, we were down to 5 pups left. Someone bought one the other weekend so, now we’re down to 4. God only knows what’s going to end up happening to them.
The folks who run the ranch built a small pen for them in a dark cold corner of the ranch so that they wouldn’t be running around pooping all over the place as it fills up with the Snowbird set. I took the dogs out of there and told them that at home I could have them charged with cruelty to animals but keeping them there. For some reason they listened. They often put the pups there during the night, but they are out and free to run all over during the day. Maybe I should stop calling them pups. They were born on August 18, they’re over 4 months old now, and getting pretty big!
So far, we’re not having as much fun as we hoped too. There’s something very exciting about finding and exploring a new place. Coming back again is, just that. We’re here again. Climbing in the mountains is still cool except my ankle that I wrecked in NYC still sisn`t back together properly. I hiked for a few hours last Sunday and had trouble putting weight on it for the rest of the day. Nothing new, all very nice, but we’re both feeling a bit that it’s just the same again. We won’t be back next winter! That’s not to say we’ll never come back, but we still have a lot of the world to see and a ton of new stuff to check out.
Christmas was quiet. We saw some friends, went out for a nice Christmas Eve dinner, met with some other friends for dinner on christmas day, but I think we were both thinking more about my kids all up in Ottawa. Kids, grandkids, extended family, 18 for dinner. Mom alone in Peterborough. Yup – we’ll do that differently next year for sure. I did manage to get out and get a haircut just before the holiday.
Jordan arrives in a few hours for about 9 days. We’re both super excited about seeing him. I have a couple of buddies who may come visit for a bit in January and February. Lynne lifelong girlfriend is coming for the month of March. Ron and Bev are planning to come the first week of April. We’re planing on starting the trip home on April 15th.
I’ve got that new bike waiting for me at home. I’m looking forward to putting some mileage on that next summer. I’m hoping to get a few race announcing gigs with the HSBC series. I’ve dug out all of my notes and the beginning 30 pages of the book I’ve been threatening to write and plan to work o n that before heading back home. I’m looking into how to turn that into a cool speech that I could take out on the road and have some fun with as well.
Lynne and I are looking into the Camino walk through the top of Spain for next fall. I keep hearing about it. It’s an almost 800k walk from France, through the mountains and across to Santiago. It should take about 30 -35 days of hiking. I must have run into 20 people of late who have done it. 15 of them have done it more than once so, we`re thinking it looks like a pretty cool adventure too.
Lynne and I sat in an African restaurant a few years ago in Washington on New Years Eve and wrote down what we thought the next year was going to look like. The possibilities for next year are endless for us right now. I think we`ll spend more time back in Ontario and, by all the things we`re looking into, I think we`ll ave a few pretty good adventures to write about too.
Happy New Year everyone. I hope everyone has some great adventures coming up soon too!
Filed under: Ajijic, General Update, Greg Collett, Hiking, Motorcycle in Mexico, Pets, Travel Storys
Wow – 14 days since the last update and 14 more sleeps until I head back to the “Old Country” for a 5 week visit.
I haven’t been writing for a while because, there isn’t a lot going on that’s new and different.
The weekend before last I decided to go for another ride out to Sayula and then Colima. Sayula is the town where all the knife makers are. I’m looking for a particular knife but, they didn’t have any, again! I’d taken the back road part way and loved it. Riding a bike down here is wonderful. The drivers are all crazy here. I have no idea what’s about to pop up in front of me in town, any town, but the highways are great. They go for miles and miles. I love riding in the sunshine sightseeing. Colima is the town beside the closest active volcano to where I live here. It’s about 200k from our casa, and about 100k from Sayula. It’s along that same great highway, but that second leg of the trip takes me through more mountains and then some bridges that span drops of several hundred feet. It’s beautiful. I couldn’t see the top of the volcano because of the clouds but it was still a great ride . . . . out!
No - I don't ride without a helmet and stuff!
This bike is only a 250 cc thing that shakes like crazy at its high-speed. It only manages 90 – 100 kph which, back home would be OK, but drivers here on the highway move between 125 – 140 – 160 kph. It’s a bit unnerving when a tandem tractor-trailer passes at those speeds. It would be nice to have a bike with enough power to get away from those guys and, not shake like the worlds biggest vibrator! I have to stop and stretch a bit every 100k or so. I got to my last stop on the way back. My GPS showed that I had 99.7k to go to get back to my house. I finished the last bit of water and the last cereal bar that I had with me. Walked a bit at the side of the road to get the kinks out and got back on the bike for the last leg of the trip. Turn the key . . . . nothing! No cranking of the engine, not lights, no horn, nada! It was as if someone had taken the battery out of the bike or had cut the wire of something. It was 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon. Most of the folks I knew were out-of-town this weekend. I wasn’t even sure if the cell phone I had would work where I was. There’s a really long complicated story to go with how I got back home, but, it’s enough to say that 5.5 hours later, the bike and I in the back of a pickup got home again! A reliable bike would be nice too!
A local guy here got it going after a few days and the boys back at the shop that I use got it humming again. It’s running like a charm right now. I think I’ll forego any long trips for a while!
Heading out at the end of the day!
The pups are about 9 weeks old now. The owner sent his boyfriend over the other day to take one of the pups for himself. I was pretty pissed that the owner never said anything to me. No Thanks or, hey, I’m giving one of the pups to my friend. The friend, who spoke zero English just came, picked them all up one at a time and took the biggest one. I gave the owner a bit of a hard time about it later but he’s one of those typical polished useless pieces of shit who say the right thing, but there’s nothing behind it. You know the type. the “My dad is a very successful self-made man and I’m the playboy son, pretending to be important the actually just pissing away dads money waiting for him to die so he can sell out and go back and hang out in Paris. Dick!! Luckily for me, he doesn’t come around to the ranch much, and almost not at all during snow bird season.
Heading Home!
I am so looking forward to getting back together with Lynne again. We talk almost every day. Being alone for the first week or two was great, but then, I started to really miss her. I’m flying up to Toronto on November the 2nd. We’ll head to NYC for the weekend and then back to Newmarket on the Monday. (NYC? I want my shirt at least!) Michelle and Gavin are meeting us there so, we should have a fun weekend bee-bopping around New York.
It will be nice to see the gang(s) back home and hang out for a bit. Lynne and I are going to drive back down here for the winter. We’re planning on leaving on about Dec 10th. Hopefully, the snow wont be flying before that. I expect we’ll do this trip in just a few days. I know people who have done it in 4 days. I think we’ll take 5 or 6.
Winter here and then drive back in the spring, probably in April or May. After that, who knows. I really don’t want to join back into city life, but I don’t want to spend endless periods of time without Lynne either. The time I’ve spent alone here has been nice in lots of ways, including letting me figure out a bit more of who and what I am and want. Part of what I discovered is that, a large part of what I am is ‘half of Lynne and Greg’!
There’s lots of time to think about next summer. I’m not going to worry about it much now. I do plan to do some looking at larger used bikes for sale while I am home next month. I’m sure the fall is the least expensive time to buy. The Honda ST 1100 is looking pretty good to me at the moment!
Honda ST 1100
It was 4 weeks ago that I cracked up that ankle and, I’m really tired of not getting out on foot much. I felt like I may have been able to go for a short hike the weekend before last but decided to lay low for one more week before trying a hike in the mountains again. I almost went twice this weekend but . . .it just didn’t happen. Today was the day though.
The weather still looked crappy, like it was going to rain any minute but, that was the reason i hadn’t gone over the weekend so, screw it, I headed out. It turned out to be a great morning for a hike. About 70 degrees, but overcast so there was no sun beating down. I wore jeans and my bike boots for extra support. I sure didn’t win any speed records but, I got out tot the falls and back.
The trailhead was lush with thick green growth. It felt like walking into a jungle rather than just the woods.
Trailhead (Click any picture for a larger image)
There was a small waater fall about half way along. The vegitation has filled in so much, it was hard to find the path at times.
Where's the trail?
I was beginning to think I was lost at one point. I thought I could hear the main falls but the path got very narrow and the brush had filled in a lot. In this next picture, the brush had filled in so much there was only about four feet of open space to get through.
Looks like time to jump down the rabbit hole doesn't it?
And finally, the falls! Maybe 75 feet high. There was more water rushing over the top[ the lat time I was there, but it was still pretty cool to see again today.
The Falls
I’m planning on going again tomorrow morning with Lucia from here at the ranch. Hopeully, it rains moire tonight and they be even more beautiful tomorrow.
Oh yea - almost forget! The ankle held up well. I walked pretty slow and careful compared to my usual pace, but it feels fine. Maybe next week I’ll go for a wee run and see how it feels.
