I Don't Know Vic, but I'd Like To

I'm going to follow Vic's Big Walk. He's walking from Puivert about, France to Blackpool, England and he's keeping a blog about it. Check it out at http://www.vicsbigwalk.blogspot.com/

Don't be surprised if it looks familiar. He's using the same template on Blogger that North of Andorra uses.

Deja Vu All Over Again

There was a time when we were building our cabin in Montana, that we used to fantasize about having the time to sit on the front porch for an entire morning or afternoon, with no work that tugged at our conscience. Eventually, that time came, but at times, it seemed that it would never arrive. Deja vu, to borrow a French term. We are looking forward to finishing the upstairs bathroom, and not a little bit of the anxiety is because we have to trudge downstairs at night to use the toilet. But at least we have another bathroom. We've been busy not having too much fun. This is the upstairs bathroom that has been gutted. The pink sink, pink tile and pink bathtub have been removed and hauled away. Down came the plaster, up came the floorboards and they all went to the dump, except for the bathtub, which will get melted down and made into cars or something. You can see the plumber has spent some time here (at $88 an hour), and run new PEX red and blue water lines and some black ABS waste lines. Little remains except the old floor joist.

This is after the new sub-floor has been put down. You can see the toilet waste line in the corner and the shower drain line in the left center, and a few of the new water lines, copper and PEX blue.

This is the wall where the pink sink was attached. You can see a bit of the old wallpaper, which we don't miss at all, and a few electrical lines, some new water lines. What you can't see are the tools and tile and wire and lumber scattered around the upstairs bedrooms. Everything is in turmoil, with cardboard on the floors along with new tile, buckets of drywall mud and tubes of caulk. At times, the beds had tools and stuff scattered around on them. Oh, woe.

This is a picture of the first few pieces of beadboard going up on the ceiling. Shortly after we finished the ceiling, we put up drywall on the walls and cement board on the shower walls. To make room for the shower stall, we had to rip out the old door (which opened like shutters, hinged on each side, kind of like an old saloon door) and move it a half a foot over. Rest assured, we threw away the old doors and installed a handsome six panel pine door.

This is a picture peeking into the shower stall while Nancy is laying out the new tile, which is natural stone, or more correctly, natural pebbles. They come glued to a square foot of plastic mesh, but they are still difficult to handle.

And here are the pebbles set into place and grouted. We are beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. The drywall is being finished when Nancy has time between laying tile and grouting tile. I don't have a good picture of the new tile floor because it is always covered with cardboard during the construction. But soon, we will have pictures of the finished bathroom, and if we can find it, a picture of the "before" with the pink sink and tub. I know I can't wait. Stand by.

It's Been a Month

I notice it's been almost a month since I've posted anything on the blog and I don't feel all that guilty. We've been very busy, and doing things that are not the least bit interesting to write about. We took a quick trip to Montana to see some friends and we didn't do much beyond eat, drink and be merry.


We demolished our main bathroom and we've begun work on the new bath. Nancy is setting tile today and will be doing that for a few more days. We hauled out the old pink bathtub, a cast iron behemoth, and we got $12.50 for it at the metal recycling business in town. We hauled several other loads of crap to the dump. The plumbers were here for an entire day installing new pipes and vents. We are exhausted at the end of each day but we have a deadline to finish before my sister and family arrives in early June.



We made airline reservations; Denver, Frankfurt, Toulouse for August 5, and that's the biggest news I have to report.

The Pelicans of Peurto Vallarta

The pelicans on the beaches in Peurto Vallarta were very comical, but they were also very efficient fishers. They would infest any boat or structure anywhere near the water, watching the activities like awkward old men. When they took to the air, they were transformed into more graceful objects and we watched them delicately float ten or twenty feet above the surface of the water until they spied a fish and then quickly dive into the water and come up with a meal.

Below, I caught a pelican just as it splashes into the water. It looks rather clumsy because rather than slicing cleanly into the water, they more or less plop onto the surface. All you can see are the wings. What you don't see is the long neck and long beak stretched out underwater to capture a fish. Click on the picture to embiggen it to see a little of the drama.

Although there were zillions of pelicans, no shortage to be sure, it was sad to see one dead on the beach. Why was it dead? It had got caught in fishing line. I saw this numerous times in Yellowstone, birds caught and drowned due to some careless fisherman who threw or abandoned his line in the water. No telling how many birds die every year due to being tangled in fishing line, but I'm sure it's a lot.

The Papantla Flyers

We stumbled upon these guys on the Malecon in P.V. We had no clue who they were and had to wait til we got back home and had Internet access to find out. I refer you to another website that tells the whole story.

www.paradisebymarriott.com/feeds/vacation.php?include=135441 In a nutshell, it was a religious rite performed to deliver a message to the god of fertility. Later, it was camouflaged as sport so that the Spaniards would not punish the participants or banish the practice.

With each revolution around the pole, the rope would feed out and the upside down twirlers would be lower to the ground by another few feet. The gentleman at the top of the pole would beat his drum and blow his flute as the twirlers descended. Very puzzling if you didn't know the reason. When they reached the beach, they stood around for awhile, I imagine to get rid of any dizziness, then they climbed the pole, retracted their ropes, and did it again. Amazing.

In this picture, the gentleman on the far left has just inverted himself and gotten ready to touch down.

We Shall Return

This was the view from our condo in Puerto Vallarta Mexico, where we spent the past couple of weeks. Our place overlooked the old part of town, known as the Zona Romantica, an area of shops, restaurants and hotels and condos. The weather was beautiful, warm with a cooling breeze, not at all hot and almost the same temperature day and night. A nice change from frigid Colorado where we missed out on a major winter storm. Off to the right side of the photo is a church tower that I mistakenly thought was quite old, but was actually built in the 50's. And therein lies the problem with Puerto Vallarta. It's really too new to be truly interesting.

But of course the major attraction is the sea and the beach, and they were beautiful. The waves crashed noisily but the area was not really good for surfing. It was great for sunbathing and relaxing, ordering beers from the seaside restaurants and watching the tourists go by. P.V. is loaded with tourists from the U.S. and Canada, and even though spring break was on, the bulk of the tourists are quite old, 60 and up. The other thing to note was that there was no shortage of gringos. Someone told us that upwards of 65,000 gringos were in P.V. at any give time between November and April, which accounts for about one third of the population. Many of them were full-time or seasonal residents, resulting in the overwhelming prevalence of English being spoken everywhere a tourist buck was being made. The patrons at the restaurants spoke English because they were generally Canadian or American, and the waiters spoke English because of the overwhelming number of gringos. Tourists were everywhere, on the bus, in the shops, walking the malecon, sitting on the beach and it would not be an exaggeration to say you heard more English spoken than Spanish. The menus, magazines, signs and advertising, were in English,... or both languages.......giving me new found respect for the French and their reluctance to prostitute themselves and their language for the almighty dollar.

The Malecon is a walkway that stretches for several miles along the beach and at times there is a roadway between the beach and the commercial strip, and at other times nothing separated the beach from the restaurants and condos.Along the beach were hundreds of Mexicans trying to make a buck. Some sold trinkets, souvenirs, silver, hats, sunglasses, food and everything a tourist on the beach could ever desire. Others did sand sculptures for a small donation. Still others did amazing feats of skill, and I'll post pictures of that in a later post. The guys doing sand sculptures hauled tons of sand and seawater, used shovels, rakes, trowels and buckets, and made some interesting sand creations.

And one enterprising gentleman made himself into a sculpture. Somehow he coated his clothing and skin with sand and stood stock-still until an unsuspecting tourist stood next to him having their picture taken, assuming he was just another sculpture. And then he would begin to move, scaring the bejusus out of the goofy tourists.

We got a lot of enjoyment out of watching the pelicans. They were very comical, sitting on the boats, or standing on the beach. But they were excellent fishers, diving from above and almost always coming up with a small fish to theatrically swallow down their long necks.

We'll post more thoughts and pictures about our trip a little later, and possibly some thoughts about the differences travelling in Mexico versus France.