Matehuala and Las Palmas
Las Palmas is widely known among norte americano travelers as an overnight stop over. It is also known as a pet friendly hotel. In fact, during our stay, we saw several travelers with dogs. The rooms are all outside the hotel, each with their own little carport. Our room had areas of green space on the side and in the back of the car poet which were perfect for Louie.
RAV4 parked alongside our Las Palmas room. Very nice green spaces for Louie.
Beautiful green space areas with hiking trails on the other side of the wall that circle hotel compound.
We were able to have an early dinner outside of the restaurant, where we learned last year that dogs were welcome. When our waiter came out to serve us, we were surprised to learn that servicio de perros were welcome inside the restaurant. The well-dressed waitstaff were anxious to please us with their service.
We started off with totopos, limes, a creamy salsa rojo, and our first first taste of cerveza Indios in Mexico.
And for our first meal in Mexico:
Fajirtas de Adobe
Enchiladas rojos that because the tortillas were so fresh, they tasted like tamales.
Jackie and I left Matehuala and Las Palmas the next morning after a leisurely breakfast in their terrific restaurant. The waitstaff was again immaculately dressed and congenial. We took Louie inside with us this time wearing his “service dog” vest because we had heard staff was welcoming to servicio de perros. The head waiter greeted us and I asked him, ¿Se permiten servicio de perros? ¡Si, si, señor, claro que si! He directed us to a very nice table by the window looking out on the outdoor patio where we ate the previous evening:
This was our second time at Las Palmas. Last spring we stopped there on our way back to the states in our truck camper. On the way out of the resort I took the wrong exit for campers and the roof air conditioner struck the bottom edge of the hotel’s archway, destroying the truck camper’s air conditioner and damaging the lower edge of the overhang. Fortunately, we had Mexican insurance to pay for the hotel damage, but this trip I noticed that he damage was still there:
Apparently, our visit to Las Palmas last April made a lasting impression: note damage to the lower edge of the overhang.
Patience of a Zen Monk
from zenlightenment.net
Las Palmas is right on Mx hwy 57—one of the benefits of staying in Matehuala—so all we needed to do was turn left onto the hwy and head south. Hwy 57 bypasses San Luis Potasi on the way to San Miguel. Very easy drive south. We took 57 to hwy 110 turning off towards Dolores Hildalgo, north of San Miguel. Took the 110 to hwy 51 south to SMA, from the map a seemingly easy 25 minute drive to the glorieta (roundabout) that leads 51 around the perimeter of inner city San Miguel.
It wasn’t an easy drive at all.
As I have written elsewhere in this blog, driving in Mexico requires a special kind of mental and physical skill that takes practice to develop, a state of mind probably not that much different from the state of mind of a Zen monk.
Highway 51 is very smooth and obviously well-maintained highway, but the traffic was heavy with crazed drivers in a mad hurry to get somewhere. Two-lane highways can be tricky everywhere in Mexico, but this particular road had more than its share of frightening moments.
The unwritten rules of the road dictate, basically, that you drive very fast to keep up with traffic or straddle the shoulder line so that vehicles can pass you. This means that sometimes the slow-straddling has to happen on the other side of the road as well, allowing passing vehicles to straddle the center line. A whole lot of straddling goin’ on. Yes, nerve wracking and dangerous, and the only way to deal with the stress is to maintain the patience of a Zen Monk.
Approaching the San Miguel roundabout. From Google Maps
I had studied our route to our SMA apartment closely on Google Maps (knowing ahead of time how radically Google GPS can vary from actual, on-the-ground street view), so once we hit the San Miguel roundabout, I felt pretty confident about navigating the crazy one-way streets to get to our apartment destination.
Everything went perfectly, and we were within a quarter mile of the apartment entrance, when, suddenly, without reason, I made a wrong turn. I couldn’t turn around and return the way we had come because it was a one-way street. But somehow, after navigating a very slow zig-zag, we got back on track and arrived at Callejon Cuevitas 26.
Call and Response 