Today at Casa Engelbrecht, #18 Santo Domingo, June 25, 2008.

Here’s a little travelblog about Morgan and my trip to the 16^th century colonial town of SMA in the mountains of central Mexico. I was supposed to come here for the month of February 2007 to meet Barbara Magee, dancing friend from Troy, NY, but mi mama was diagnosed with bone cancer and I could not/would not leave the Midwest where we live—my parents in Michigan, and we in Illinois. As planned, Barbara visited SMA for two months in 2007 and her husband Kevin, also a dancer, visited for a week. We told Morgan’s great friend Jim Lewis from Tampa about San Miguel and he came here for the summer of 2007. It’s a very seductive place. When Morgan and I planned to come for a month this summer, I invited Barbara to come visit us. She and Kevin just happened to be coming here for the first week of our planned visit. (Got it? That’s all background and now I can just blast off).

We arrived in San Miguel just as the rainy season started. Every afternoon there’s a rainfall. Yesterday on the way home from escuela (Warren Hardy Spanish School), (Morgan had come to meet Jim and me), we were stopped by a squall and ducked under a stone overhang on to a patio. After waiting 20 minutes, the designated time of all SMA rainfalls, it continued to pour, so we went into the restaurant for a snack. Guacamole. There came a deluge which sprayed all the way back to the kitchen. Everyone who’d sought refuge under the colonade rushed into the restaurant and the huge wooden doors were shut. By the time the rain ended, the cobblestone streets had become rivers, no way to cross them without going shin deep. That should take care of the drought.

Yet it’s way green here. The maids sweep the grass here at our casita. Beautiful gardens, lemon, peach, pomegranate trees, bougainvilleas, zinnias.

San Miguel church bells toll all the time, as if they can’t agree on clock-time. There are 23 churches in town, I hear.

In the evening, Jim and I climbed the road up into the rich area, still all cobblestone, passed Puerticita Boutique Hotel overlooking a forested ravine. Wow, reminds me of el Positana in Italy where Morgan and I went to try to salvage our relationship 25 years ago. (I guess it worked. We’re still together and doing very well). Jim preferred the hotel farther up the hill, like a sprawling Hawaiian hotel. On the way back down the hill we stopped at the castillo, a house with a turret, occupied, Jim said, for the first time since he’d gotten here a month ago. A Land Rover with NY plates stood in the gated parkway but within the gates the back door was open. Joan Baez was inside singing “You can hear the whistle blow 100 miles…” Peace music. Just when I said “Joan Baez” a dog came growlingsnarling thrashing to turn the corner to get outside and at us. I grabbed Jim and he me, we jumped into the air, clonked heads, as we tried to bolt. Then laughed, nearly out of control, the next 15 minutes, all the way down the hill, quoting tomorrow’s paper: Gringo turistos collide and collapse before boxer watchdog dismembers them on Calle Santo Domingo.