Thanksgiving Weekend

Our first morning at the Cañon de Guadalupe brought a bit of a surprise. We were lying in bed and heard some movement in our camping area. At first I wondered if it was someone was stacking something there, but the sound wasn’t quite right. And, if so, why were they doing it in our area? Were we no longer welcome or something? When I peeked through the curtains, I found I was completely wrong. There were two donkeys scavenging in our camp site! One was pulling up baby palm fronds from the ground near the large palm. And the other was eating the dried palm fronds from the shelter.

Later when I opened the door, the dried-palm-eater wanted to come inside and try out the materials inside. I had to convince her that would not be a good idea.

It was a good thing we hadn’t slept outside in the shelter; we might have wakened to donkeys tasting our sheets. They had ventured all the way to the hot tub.

When we had returned the jack the night before, our rescuees/rescuers told us to stop by Thanksgiving afternoon. So, before we started making our “Thanksgiving dinner,’ we ventured over to see what they were up to. Turns out they (Bridget and Brian) were making a special Thanksgiving day dinner already and we were invited. Bridget whipped up a tasty dinner of mashed sweet potatoes, cornbread, brussel sprouts, fried red potatoes, sourdough bread, and even turkey. She had even created some homemade cranberry sauce for the turkey. All of it was great. Very tasty, surprisingly even the brussel sprouts were scrumptious (I had second helpings of them). I had never enjoyed canned cranberry sauce, but the homemade stuff was fantastic. To top it off, there was even pumpkin pie with whipped cream, which all of us but Jonathan enjoyed.

So, all of you who were concerned that I wouldn’t get an appropriate Thanksgiving meal can be thankful to Bridget and Brian for their hospitality.

The next morning we had to leave. We didn’t have reservations and someone else was going to be in that spot. We took off down the off-roading path and bumpy road again. I think Jonathan will have to re-lube all the parts of the van again to fight off the dust from the roads.

We drove to just south of Ensenada that night to Campo mi Refugio. This site is a home that is built like a small castle with little turrets. You can camp next to it for $200 pesos. Good views too.

Saturday morning, we braved the walk along the flea market to La Bufadora (snorter). We managed to make it all the way through without having to buy anything. La Bufadora is a crevice in the rocks that during a high wave intakes waters and puffs it out in a spray. It was fun.

Afterwards, we made our way to the Wal-Mart to stock up on food. We were completely out of breakfast foods. The Wal-Mart was interesting. It had a lot of name brands rebranded into Spanish foods. They had very little of the Wal-Mart generic. In the fresh foods section, they were selling cactus to eat! I liked the cart.

Spanish Words of the Day:

Dinner: la cena

Thanksgiving Day: día de acción de gracias

Donkey: burro

Spanish Words of the Day (for blog posted 11-21):

To drive: manejar

Rope: la cuerda

To pull: jalar