Not to make you green with envy, but

This is the view from the balcony outside our room in Chacala. From here, I get to watch the fisherpeople catch my dinner or the pelicans dive-bomb the ocean for their next meal. Some of the pelicans just sit on the fishing boats and hang out, providing fishing tips perhaps?

Our flight to Houston was uneventful. On our flight from Houston to Puerto Vallarta we were stuck behind a father and his two brats. I don’t know what was worse, the kids whining or the father hacking up a lung without covering his mouth. GROSS. We finally got off the germ capsule in Puerto Vallarta and made our way through all the drivers and hotel reps hustling for business. We found a taxi stand and worked out a price to go to Chacala (about 90 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta). Chris fell asleep almost immediately upon entering the cab. I was fully awake for every minute as we wound our way up a curvy two-lane highway through the mountains. Although there are no guard rails, people are kind enough to put up a memorial cross and some flowers every few kilometers. At least our cab driver waited until the less curvy parts before he sped past cars on our side and toward trucks coming directly at us on the other. (Take that, Nascar.)

We finally arrived in Chacala, exhausted. The sand and rocks called streets were throwing us all around the cab. It took us a while to find someone who could tell us where the house was. (I had copied a map from the web, but there are no street names here so it gets kind of confusing.) We finally found someone who directed us. They left the key in the door for us and the room unlocked. We had the whole house to ourselves. After checking things out, we locked the room and went down to the infinity pool overlooking the ocean.

After our dip, we went back to the room. We tried the key. The key did not work. We tried the key a million times, still nothing. There was no one around and we couldn’t even remember the first name of the woman who left the key for us. So there we were in our bathing suits walking the streets of Chacala looking for anybody - no money, no credit cards, no clothes, no shirt (Chris, not me). We came across some guys sitting outside a house and asked them if they knew a woman with the last name of lawler (or something like that) who worked at the Casa de Tortugas. Amazingly, they knew who I was talking about and tried to direct me to her house. Giving directions is very difficult when there are no street names, so he had us jump in the back of his friends pickup and they drove us over there. He called out in front of the house. (People don’t knock here, they just call out the name of who they are looking for and someone comes out.) A woman in the house told him that the lady we wanted was at her other job, in the next town. The guy (Chaco) was going to drive us out there, but when I explained to him that what we needed was a key, he took me two doors down to Lupe’s house. Lupe also works for the house and gave us (complete strangers) the key for the main floor. There we were able to get access to all the house keys. Gotta love a small town.

For the last two days I have been waking up to the sound of ocean waves and birds chirping. I’ve been eating seafood caught that morning and cooked up right on the beach and washing it down with an ice-cold beer. My greatest daily challenge has been the slightly uphill walk back to our house after going down to the restaurants to eat. I could get very used to this.