Hell’s Half Acre

We spent all day yesterday preparing; washing and storing and cleaning, and after working a few hours this morning, spent another 1.5 hours getting ready to go.  Our brake controller has been funny lately and Jamie had disconnected it before he left.  I hitched up and connected the wires and it simply would not function.  I’m almost positive the controller is fried, and while I could drag the trailer and use just the car brakes (and who knows, the trailer brakes *might* be working), it just isn’t the safest choice.  So, here we are, still, in Mazatlan.

I was itching to move SOMEWHERE though, so I moved campsites.  For some reason, the tourist tap was turned back on and we’re full up with TWO OTHER CAMPERS here.  It has been empty for so very long and today two seperate rigs pulled in.  One will stay a couple weeks and the other I’m not sure about.

So, the other day, when I was finishing up all my errands, I was waxing nostalgic for all of the things in Mazatlan that I’d miss.  The fresh chicken.  You can spend a good 1/2 hour going on either bus or particular transport to go to the municipal market to get ranch chicken (instead of Bachoco chicken-farm chicken).  I’ve driven by enough of the Meixcan chicken farms that I much prefer my chicken from the rancho, irregardless of the size of their pea brains.  So, since the kids are deathly afraid of the meat area of the municipal market, where great slabs of beef, animals skinned but hooves and feet still attached lay about and blood collects in puddles, I have been buying my rancho chicken from a house.  It almost feels like drug deal; I drive by the house to see if the sign is out.  If it is, (and really, they don’t need a sign, the place smells like dead chicken in the heat) then in I go and order my chicken.  I don’t know if they butcher it in the back, but when I come by to pick it up, it is plucked and ready to go.  So, I thought I’d miss shopping for chicken.

We must eat a lot of chicken (stinky and all) because the next thing I though of was the Sinaloa style chicken we get on Sundays.  One day a week, Sunday, the two ladies (I’m going to find out their names one of these days) turn a couple of metal barrels into a BBQ pit and grill up chicken Sinaloa style.  You drive by, stop, a crowd is always there and they figure out who is next and what chicken is for whom and you simply tell them how many.  They’ll pick out yours, chop it up for you, add tortillas, rice, salsa and shredded iceberg lettuce and you put your money in the plastic wipe box (newly re-incarnated as a treasury) and off you go.  So I thought I’d miss the ladies.

Laundry has become easy once again and I thought I’d miss laundry.  I started doing laundry here by hand because new to the city, all I could find were the tourist laundry drop-off places that charge 50 pesos/kilo.  Took us for $20 last year.  So, I’d drag the laundry down to the stone sink, scrub, rinse, hang and repeat.  Then, I found San Bartolo trailer park and made an arrangement with the encargante to do laundry on Sundays from 8am to noon (while the patrones were gone) at 10 pesos/load.  But, I had to buy fichas (tokens) for the machines and if he wasn’t around it was troublesome and I could only go on Sundays at those times.  Still, it was easier than doing them by hand.  Quite by chance I found my newest laundry guy; he has his own place, with 5 washers and a couple dryers, but I only wash.  Thirteen pesos a load and I’m out of there in an hour.  Course, sometimes he is doing wash for others and I have to come back when the washers are free, so I do my chicken run or water run or Gigante (super) run and come back.  So I thought I’d miss my laundry guy, but I guess not.

We’ll be here until Jamie et.al arrive, hopefully with a new brake controller.  Now, I’m off to figure out just which controller we should buy.  The Prodigy used to be the one to get when we started RV’ing and I wonder if it still is…