Puerto Vallarta II

It's sad to have to think about leaving. There's a leaden ball in the pit of my stomach when I think about returning to the grind of work, one that I think even surpasses the usual end of vacation blues: I know I am going to get my ass kicked. Why fight it?

Turns out that this place, Garza Blanca Preserve, is really slated to become condos and a very nice lady offered us this place for keeps, for a mere $1.1 million (fractional purchase available)! Wish Anne had brought the check book.

In fact, it looks like the entire Puerto Vallarta area, if not all of Mexico is on sale. Mexican architects are good! Really good. There are more than a few Japanese flourishes (like the full-autopilot toilets in the lobby!) to this place: the lines are clean, the materials good and little has been left out. And, it seems, every condo and villa from one end of town to the other, most of these ambitious projects having been started around the same time; when it appeared Mexico's tourist boom would be insatiable, are of similar quality.....giant balconies overlooking a now very clean ocean (saw whales and dolphins from our seats in the restaurant yesterday morning), comfy, sturdy, hammocks, great kitchens, local wood furnishings, and did I mention the views?

And prices, as we have been told or read at least twenty times, have never been lower! Now, Anne, why didn't you bring the checkbook again? I suppose lusting after a permanent place where you are vacationing is as natural as feeling the blues about leaving. If we had bought something everywhere we'd thought we'd like to live, we'd have a dozen houses! And we can't even afford the one we have.

Enough real estate envy.

There are a few more things worth reporting about the trip. They, inevitably, revolve around food, as it seems we spend most of our time careening from one meal to the next, I am happy to report that our lunch at the traditional restaurant at Vallarta's beautiful Botanical Gardens was one of the best meals we had. The views of the wide expanse of local flora from the second floor terrace that runs around the perimeter of the the giant visitor's center are impressive. The food is also deeplyflavored and very good and in the jungle humidity, ice cold cerveza has never tasted better. There is good (if good means regular as opposed to opulent) bus service that cost us all of $2 each so, along with the zoo, I'd sure make sure it was on your itinerary for Puerto Vallarta.

After the outstanding day at the gardens, our confidence in the buses was high enough to think it would be easy to navigate to Marina Vallarta, north of El Centro, from our spot seven and half kilometers south of town making a simple change.

That's not how it worked out.

In fact, if on every vacation, you have to sacrifice one segment to the Trip Gods for their amusement, this would be it. We were planning on visiting a (from now and forever more unnamed) restaurant co-owned by a fellow Bay Area restaurant person and recommended to us by a colleague. We had sent them an e-mail saying that we'd pop by for dinner at maybe 7:30 or so and we thought we'd leave an hour to wander aruound the marina area. We got the bus to El Centro without any difficulties but hopped on another bus indicated to us by some guy standing around near the bus stop, as he appeared to be in the know, even though nowhere on the windshield was chalked our intended destination. It was now dark and the jarring trip over El Centro's cobblestones was reassuring enough and we recognized the road that runs out towards the airport, so all was well. It was after we got to Wal-Mart (and yes, there's a Costco AND a Sam's Club, all located within a few blocks of each other) and the pack of gringos on the bus rolled off that the lights of the town turned into barely lit warrens of cobbled alleys, scary looking warehouses and row upon row of apartment blocks . We kept going and going and going, gradually relieving ourselves of all of the other passengers on the bus until it was only us. The driver looked back, raised his hands in a 'hey, I only drive this thing' gesture. We told him that we headed to the marina and he laughed right in our faces. He told us to sit and we sputtered our way around a few more corners, an impossible intersection where our single lane split a double lane of oncoming traffic like the middle prong of a fork (I thought I was seeing things) and found ourselves at the bus yard in who-knows-where. A guy there stuck us on another bus and, before you know it, (well, it was really a half hour later), we were delivered to the marina, and subsequently followed our bus adventure up with what was perhaps one of the worst meals ever!

We weren't even hungry. We had made the trip because we felt obliged to visit this Bay Area colleague only to find that he had wandered off an hour or so before we got there, (no one knew where). We ordered two glasses of Roederer Estate Brut that tasted like apple cider (storage, my friends, storage) and a perfectly reasonable arugula salad. Things, however, went downhill from there. I ordered a light sounding Farfalle Pasta with Pesto and Shrimp (OK, here's a tip, the shrimp here are wonderful. They have the texture and taste of lobster and we've been ordering them at every meal) with mushy pasta and bland pesto that was dilute with pasta cooking water. And the globs of chalky, as yet unincorporated pesto made the dish laughably bad. Anne had Spaghetti Vongole but the giant clams, several of which were unopened, had the consistency and appeal of snot and were completely inedible. Anne, wisely, stuck to Pellegrino water but I had a glass of Mexican Semillon-Chardonnay which managed to be both tasteless and bitter at the same time. Anne had a coffee, we skipped dessert and grabbed a cab home! We gave the cabbie $200 pesos for a $160 fare just because we were soooooo glad to have that evening end. The extra-ironic thing about this whole meal that we didn't want in the first place and took us two hours to get to, is that, other than the fabulous dinner we had here in our hotel that was worth every peso, our foray to the marina was the most expensive to date!

I know I am in the business and, and, as such, should always refrain criticizing other restaurants. Noted. But really.........

Yesterday the sun came out in earnest and we ducked in and out of shops in El Centro for a few hours, had a lovely lunch (keep the cold Cerveza coming, baby!) one the second floor terrace of a local dive and spent the early evening hours floating in the infinity pool (gotta get me an infinity pool!), the hot tub and the ocean. Dinner consisted of some more ice cold Cerveza and leftover Shrimp Quesadilla from the Botanical Garden lunch out on the terrace.

And suddenly its go-home day. Poor Anne. She has the cold I came with and we didn't even get to buy a condo.

See you all back at the ranch.