Hell’s Half Acre

For the kids, time can’t fly by fast enough but for Jamie and I it is flying by WAY too fast. The days fill with errand after errand which seem to only pile on top of each other instead of becoming accomplished. Today we hoped to get meds for Jamie, add pesos to our phones, buy presents for those who will remain un-named, pick up lettuce and tomatoes and massive quantities of vinegar. Don’t ask. We spent the morning getting laundry dry (finally a sunny day!), the kitchen packed, and the furniture in the comedor, behind the trailer where it will hopefully not turn into projectile objects in a hurricane/storm. At one point I checked USAir’s website for a different routing and found that had we purchased our tickets today, instead of way in advance, we could have saved $600USD. That was a very bitter pill and while I tried to reason with the US Air customer service, there was no recourse other than to pay $600 penalties to re-book the flight. We then spent the next four hours (honestly, it just might have been that long) finding a doctor to give Jamie a prescription. Almost all the offices were closed as it was siesta time of day but we finally found a wonderful clinic which not only had no problem with the prescription but also gave me some good advice (probotics!) for Jesse and my tummy upset. I was really impressed as the normal advice is antibiotics. I just might buy some anyway as medicine is so expensive in the US. She also had some good ideas for farmacias to try for Jamie’s meds, so off we headed to try and accomplish that feat. The street on which so many farmacias are located has been torn up the last month or so and the first couple farmacias no longer stocked his medication. Those farmacias referred us to other farmacias and it only took about an hour to get a farmacia stocking the medication and purchase it. I was starting to get itchy about getting back to the kids, some 10 hours after we’d left them, but Jamie had to have his vinegar (cleaning the trailer tanks before we leave) so off we headed to Chedraui at Las Americas, which, co-incidentally, was where I had purchased the phones.

We have a promotion with the phones that gives us 100 pesos of minutes each month for the first three months. Unfortunately, after purchasing an additional 30 pesos of minutes, not only did I find that the additional 100 pesos was no longer credited, but the day that the pesos expired had been advanced from November 25th to October 30th!!! I really didn’t want to loose all those minutes so off we headed to the phone store where we were advised to head over to the TelCel customer service center by Soriana. By now, we’d been gone about 17 hours from the kids and I was not only getting antsy but was pretty damn sick of shopping and doing errands. Fortunately, TelCel was a bastion of efficiency and we were in and out in only 14 hours. Unfortunately, we’re kinda screwed on our promotional phone minutes but we got the great news that we will probably have no problem using the phones when we get back to Mexico. And, it only took 14 hours to figure this out. I’m telling you, the DMV could learn a lot from TelCel.

So, we’ve only been away from the kids some 31 hours and we figure they’re pretty fine and I’ve been text messaging with Jesse and even a bona fide voice phone call (at 4 pesos/minute) and we decide to purchase a stove at an amazing price with a 20% discount. We also pick up some meds for family in Chile. The stove transaction only took about 5 hours, as we had to get a clerk, go to the stockroom, fill our the order, hand the stock guy $2000MN and wait while he disappeared for change. (I HOPED!!) He then led us to the front of the store, pocketed the receipt and told us he’d be back. I wondered out loud to Jamie whether it was a really good idea to hand over $2000MN to this guy and then let him walk off, but no matter; he was back quickly (only 1.5 hour wait) and off we headed to the car and FINALLY, oh FINALLY, home! And that is what we did today. And it only took 57 hours!