Sylvie's Travels Home

January 25 and 26. 2024

At 7am, Pogo, Derrick and Dan went to pickleball and Sherry and I went to Deidre’s to have coffee with her, Moira and Andrew. We watched the full moon set on the bay and the sun rise over the mountains. We did essentrics stretching on the rooftop. Sherry, Deidre, Moira and Andrew went biking and I went back to the condo to drive Mom to la Isla where everyone gathered for breakfast. It was Graciela’s birthday and her son came to have breakfast with her.

I worked on my blog and I did laundry. Derrick and Deidre went to get their friend Stephanie at the airport. She will be staying at a condo at the Flamingo, not too far from us until her other friends arrive, then they will go to Punta de Mita. Mom rested all afternoon. We went to Los Pericos for dinner then after having a really hard time finding a place to park since many streets were closed because of the festival, we were able to make our way to the churro stand. So yummy!

Friday morning, we had coffee again at the penthouse, and we saw what we thought was a log floating in the ocean. I thought maybe it was a crocodile since they had been a sighting of one the day before in Bucerias. Pogo was droning and confirmed that it was indeed a huge crocodile!

At 9am, we took Mom, Moira and Andrew to the Botanical Gardens. We dropped Sherry and Dan in Puerto Vallarta on the way there. We stopped at Los Arcos to take a few pictures. I needed to go to the bathroom and the porta potty was disgusting but a merchant offered me a clean bathroom for 10 pesos. Behind the curtain of their booth, I had to go down steep stairs along the cliff and I had to bend down to enter the door into a deep narrow cavern like bathroom. There was a sink on the left, a urinal and a toilet behind a curtain. The ceiling was covered with spider webs. I did my business as quickly as I could and wonder if the porta potty might have been a better idea.

We did a quick stop at Boca de Tomatlan, another favorite village of ours. It was quite busy. It was the first time being there when the tide was high so it was interesting to see the boats easily come out of the little river.

We arrived at the Botanical Gardens a little before noon, walked around for a bit, had a lovely lunch courtesy of Moira and Andrew then explored some more. Pogo sat with Mom on the couch, in the open sitting area, his favorite place there. Moira found a lot of inspiration for her gardening business.

Meanwhile Derrick had gone biking with Deidre then went to play pickleball. Deidre and Stephanie went to Bucerias for lunch and a little shopping.

We all met in the pool around 5pm then had pizza and salad, courtesy of Dan and Sherry, at the penthouse and watched some of Pogo’s drone movies from past year in Mexico but also footage from this week and it was amazing to see the crocodile from so close. Everybody played poker but Mom and I who returned to the condo around 8:30pm to go to bed. My cold is not getting better.