Bob & Sherwood’s Road Trip to Akumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico
September 2007
We are driving down to Akumal on the Yucatan Peninsula from San Francisco. Just the two of us. And our four dogs! In a Honda CRV! Well, we’ve always been a close family!
Bob retired at the end of March from Anchor Brewing Company, where he had been a brewer for 24 years of the world famous Anchor Steam beer. No more free beer! First adjustment to be made…
Sherwood just up and quit her job at the end of May at Cupertino Electric, where she was an executive assistant, marketing coordinator, events planner, proposal princess, HR nightmare, babysitter, hand holder, office mangler, Jill of all trades, and president of vice. No more steady paychecks. Second adjustment. How am I going to buy beer with no money?
We decided to take the summer to get ready for the trip. We had a whole list of things that we needed and/or wanted to get done, but unfortunately, neither of us ever thought to actually write the list down – so we’re hoping that nothing fell through the cracks. Oh, and deadlines might have been a good idea too, since I am the queen of procrastination… but hey, I work best under pressure!
First on the list – get a rooftop cargo carrier for the CRV. But before that, we need to have a roof rack installed. Sherwood insists on having a factory installed roof rack from the Honda dealership – so we get that done. The car comes home and there is a sticker on the roof rack – maximum capacity, 75 lbs., evenly distributed. I think to myself, 75 lbs, hey, that’s a lot of stuff! Wrong! That wouldn’t even hold two of the dogs… Next stop, Sears, where we saw a cargo carrier that was roomy and on sale. It’s called an X-Cargo and so I’m in love with it for the name – reminds me of a dumb joke, I’ll tell it later – and cuz I love snails. So, looking at the information for the carrier – roof rack must have a minimum capacity of 150 lbs. Can we put two roofracks on the car? So, after a little discussion that some people might have misconstrued as an argument in the parking lot, it’s back to the Honda dealership. The very helpful parts manager explains that we can get a Yakima Space Cadet there that will have the storage capacity that we need and meet the weight restrictions. The cargo holder only weighs 35 lbs. so we can pack 40 lbs! Sounds good! We buy it and he gives us a discount to get me and my questions out of the showroom. We bring it home and Bob easily installs it on the roof rack without any help (instructions) from me, and no swearing, throwing things, tossing the carrier onto the sidewalk. Where’s the fun in that? Easy installation does not a good story make.
We decided that we need to do a test run with the cargo carrier and all of the dogs in the car, so we headed up to the Mendocino Coast. Packed our bags for two days, put the dogs in the car and we were off. Nothing eventful happened, so not much to report. The cargo carrier didn’t fall off the car, the roof rack didn’t collapse, none of the dogs ran away and a good time was had by all.
Another item on the list of things to do was to get a GPS system with maps of Mexico. So, Sherwood researched this thoroughly, during her last few weeks at Cupertino Electric, and finally selected the Garmin C340 because it had what we needed – voice, text, maps of the US and an SD card slot – but not what we would never be able to figure out how to use – Bluetooth, traffic receiver. So, I ordered that and it was here in time for Bob’s retirement party in June. (Another story for another time.) When I was researching the GPS there was an SD card with maps of Mexico available. My parents said they would like to get that for Bob for his retirement present, so they send me the money for it! Sweet! I didn’t buy it when I saw it (lesson that should be learned but won’t be) so two months later, I finally get around to finding the complete Mexico maps with coverage of the Yucatan Peninsula included – some of them don’t include that, just Mexico City and Western Mexico, which won’t do us any good – and order that. It then takes another two weeks for me to get the information needed to get the download, order the software that I didn’t know that I needed and finally get the unlock code to download the map. Hopefully it will be able to help us, not just show us where we already know to go.
Now it’s time to pack. A friend of mine, Kate, is going to house and cat sit for us while we are gone. I clean out an entire closet so she will have a place to put her clothes. Most of the clothes in the closet I don’t even remember having… that’s how long they have been in there and not worn. I should be donating them, but they have memories so off they go into boxes into the “attic” beside the hall upstairs, where I’m sure they will sit until I get tired of tripping over them to get to the Christmas decorations. The clothes that I do remember having and actually wear go into boxes and are stored in the walk in closet. I remember to label them so I know what’s what and hopefully where to find it.
Now comes the hard part: packing only ten to fifteen pounds of clothes. I’m already thinking of ways of cheating, like packing as much as I can into the overnight bag that will be in the car with us for the trip. I’ll update this when I get around to actually doing it.
Another item on our list was to get FM3s, which are needed if you are going to take your car into Mexico for an extended amount of time. Bob and I get up early one morning (8:30 – that’s early for me!) and head down to the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco. I ask Bob the address and he says 5hundred something Folsom Street – in the Mission. I tell him, no 500-something is down by the Embarcadero, between First and Second Streets probably – I used to work at 657 Harrison, so it would just be a couple of blocks away. So we drive down Folsom, looking at numbers… Bob is reading numbers and wondering which building it is – I tell him maybe it’s the one with the gigantic Mexican flag flying from it? We find a parking space a couple of blocks away that’s FREE (unheard of in SF!) and walk up to the consulate, and get there about 10:30. We are the only non-hispanic people in the place. All of the signs are in Spanish. I’m trying to figure out where to go when one of the guards comes over and tells us in English to go up to the second floor and shows us the way. I guess the only time gringos are in there is to get the FM3s! We go up, sign in and take a seat to wait our turn. A young, handsome man well dressed in a shirt, tie and suit slacks, comes in and takes other people into an office. Eventually it is our turn. He looks over our paperwork and tells us that we will have to provide a marriage certificate – but we can bring it in when we pick up the FM3s. He tells us the cost for the filing and that we need to pay in cash – so we’re off to an ATM. Bob’s card won’t work at the first one, so it’s off to another one, where it doesn’t work, and then finally a third try… by this time, the consulate is about to close (they close at 1:00) so we figure we’ll just come back in the morning. We get there the next day and there is an obnoxious American woman telling us about buying a lot and a house and moving down to Mexico and it’s so cheap and yadda yadda yadda – just the type of person that we don’t want to live near! Luckily, she is going to Cabo San Lucas, to a development there that is geared towards Americans that want to live cheaply in Mexico. We get ads in the mail all the time for it. We can’t imagine going there to live with 4,999 other people like her. Argh! Our turn finally comes and Jose, our agent, tells us that he waited for us until 3:00 yesterday to come back – no, we don’t feel too stupid or bad! He’s very nice and takes our pictures for our FM3s. Mine makes Nick Nolte’s drunk driving mug shot look like an ad for Mister America. Of course, it’s Bob’s fault for not telling me that my hair was messed up from having pushed my glasses back onto my head…Bob of course, looks great. We pay the fee and are on our way. We return the next week to pick up our FM3s and I celebrate because I am finally ½ Mexican! When I was in second grade, my teacher had spent the summer in Mexico on a work exchange program, teaching English to the kids down there, and learning Spanish and living with a Mexican family. She came back and taught us little words – how to count to ten, mesa, arbol, pluma, etc. She would show us slides of her trip and tell us stories of Mexico. I was entranced. I fell in love with Mexico and the traditions and the colors and the people. I went home and told my mom that I knew what I was going to be when I grew up. “What is that?” she asked. “I’m going to be Mexican!,” I told her proudly! She explained to me that it didn’t work that way… so after we bought our condo in Mexico, I was very happy to call her and tell her “I told you so! I told you that I was going to be Mexican!” So it happened, even if I had to buy it, not get it the old fashioned way.
Ok, off to do the first pass at packing. I always pack way too much anyway, and we are just going for a week, so I can only imagine how much I’ll take for three months. I keep telling myself to just take the basics and favorites. I can always buy new clothes down there!
