Thursday, May 3, 2007

Garbage Trucks & TV Cable VW's



Wednesday – Week 9: San Miguel is becoming very quiet as we start into May. This morning I walked to Parque Juarez to read and I was one of the few people there. I am currently reading “The River of Doubt” which is the story of President Theodore Roosevelt’s journey of discovery of one of the unmapped and undiscovered rivers of the Amazon. It is an exciting and scary combination of travel literature and history. Appropriately I was reading in the high canopy of the park.

When walking up to the Jardin I observed the garbage truck on Aldama Street. There is parking on one side of the narrow street and the travel portion of the street is not wide enough for the truck to pass. At this point one of the garbage men takes a block and puts it in front of the right front tire, so the right wheels of the truck can get up on top of the sidewalk. They then proceeded down the street at a slight tilt using the sidewalk as part of the road. It was all very ingenious.

While I am out and about having fun observing garbage trucks, Mary Ann was starting the tedious business of getting us packed up for our departure on Saturday. We will miss this wonderful city and beautiful casa. We plan to return by a different route than our drive down (surprise!). We will return to Zacatecas the first night as we want to spend more time investigating what looked like a fascinating town. Then there will be a long drive across the Sierra Madre mountains to Durango and then on to the coast where we will stay in Mazatlan. The next day we will drive to Ciudad Obregon and finally on the fourth day exit Mexico at Nogales. Back in the United States we plan to go to Phoenix, on to Durango, Colorado and a visit to the National Parks around Moab, Utah. The final two days will be to Twin Falls, Idaho and then back to Chelan. A nice website describing various Mexican cities including Zacatecas is: http://www.advantagemexico.com/.

Quirky Living Note: One very quaint thing you notice around town is the cable TV vehicles. Back in the U.S. you see the repairmen or pole climbers using midsize vans with several ladders or often trucks with a motorized bucket lift to get up to the wires. Not in San Miguel! Here I suspect that trucks that size would often not even get down some of the streets and alleys where they had to work. The Tele-Cable Company has outfitted all their crews with Volkswagen bugs, with one long ladder fastened to the roof extending from the front bumper to the back and a line spool at the back of the ladder rack.

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