The cloud is lifting!

     Obviously, there has been silence from the Kyrie crew for quite a while. I don't really have an excuse, except to say there's been a bit of a cloud over us for--how long has it been since the outdrive decided to crap out? A little more than two months?

The Kyrie kids with their new
stuffed animals and some
of the Lopez Lopez family
who made them!

Kids from the La Cruz Kids Club and
Manos de Amor working on their
chalk drawings for the
Dog's New Life fundraiser.

      It's been a long struggle to get back to this point. Thanks to good wind and great friends, we made the trip across the Sea of Cortez and safely settled into the marina in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle here in Banderas Bay. Now I will be the first to agree that this is a great place to be stuck. This is a lovely community! We've shopped in the little tiendas, tried out a bunch of the restaurants and taco stands, and made friends with innumerable street dogs. The La Cruz Kids' Club has been a source of fun for the kids--they have done a beach clean-up, followed by a regatta with boats they made from the garbage they found; they worked in one of the local restaurants for a couple of hours and got to keep all their tips; the kids did a fundraiser for a local dog shelter by doing chalk drawings on the waterfront; there have been kids-only movie nights, as well as free movies at the amphitheater. We've seen a lot of old friends again, and made plenty of new ones, and that is just here in La Cruz!

Sopes cooking for our lunch at Nalley
and Omar's house.

Levi is honestly enjoying his
apple dessert that Omar made,
despite the look on his face!

       What else? When Joe's parents and brother were visiting, we went on an amazing field trip. There is an organization based in nearby Bucerias called Human Connections. They partner with local artisans, tradespeople, and other organizations here in Nayarit, and in turn, invite tourists and students to visit and work with them. For our tour, we visited Andres, a woodworker, and his wife Cristina, originally from the state of Guerrero; the Lopez Lopez family, part of the Tzotzil indigenous people from Chiapas, who raise sheep and turn the wool into beautiful toys and decorations; and Nallely and Omar, a couple who own and run a restaurant in Bucerias. We ended our tour at their house for lunch, and it was delicious!
     While we have enjoyed ourselves here, staying in one place for so long is starting to wear on us. I made the comment to another friend a couple of days ago that I'm beginning to feel like a liveaboard again. We spent three years just living on the boat and I want us to continue being nautical nomads! Naturally, the parts we needed to fix the outdrive had to come from England, and that set us up for a whole crazy rigmarole with customs. After several weeks, we finally found a customs broker in Guadalajara to help us out, and we took a road trip to go pick the parts up.

The "small" chapel at the
Catedral de Guadalajara.

       Guadalajara is a big city--about 1.5 million people as of the 2010 census. For those of us from Alaska, that's a huge city! We drove into it and the kids asked, "What's that big cloud over the city?" Alaska kids got their first introduction to smog! I know there is currently a travel advisory, but we never felt unsafe. We stayed just outside of the city proper in Tonala, which is still bigger than Anchorage, and has a huge population of ceramics shops. You want tiles? A ceramic sea turtle? A toilet covered in mosaic tiles? You want a nativity set with nearly life-size figures of Mary, Joseph and the Wise Men? I can guarantee they can be found in Tonala! We also caught an Uber into the historic district of Guadalajara and wandered around.
          I can now check something off my bucket list. One of the things was attending a Catholic Mass in Spanish here in Mexico, and we got to experience that in Guadalajara. The Catedral de Guadalajara, or the Basilica Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (to use it's full name in English!) was originally completed in 1618, although its towers are "new," completed in 1854, after an earthquake destroyed the first ones. The incense was a new experience for the kids and they weren't sure if they liked the smell or not, but like Joe and me, they were fascinated with the architecture and mesmerized, listening to the priest, even though none of us could understand what was going on. Somehow, it didn't matter. It was simply a brief period of time to sit quietly and reflect, and even little Megan was able to sit still for that short time.
         After that, we checked out the biggest market I've ever seen. There must have been 3000 stalls, selling everything from movies, to shoes, to pots and pans, to saddles! Not to mention all the places to buy food--produce, meat and eggs, bread, and places to sit and order all kinds of food! What did we choose to eat? We found a Japanese stall and ate sushi, ramen and teriyaki for lunch! After lunch we rounded out our tourist jaunt with a horse-drawn carriage ride through the rest of the historic district. I understood about half of what our driver told us about all the old building we drove past, including the oldest building in Guadalajara--an old theater that was originally built in the late 1500s! The events these buildings have witnessed just boggle my mind to think about!
           The drive back to La Cruz was pretty amazing as well. It felt like we were driving through the Napa or Sonoma valley. Simply swap the vineyards for acres and acres of blue agave cacti, and you'll get a pretty good idea of what we saw on that drive. We stopped in the town of Tequila, but didn't stay long. It was more touristy than we were in the mood for, and we were ready to get back home to Kyrie.

This is before we painted the old girl
this morning, but she doesn't look too
bad, if you don't look too closely...

            And now we're up to the present. At long last, we used the dinghy as a tug, as well as having some other friends use their dinghy to help us as needed, and steered over to the travel-lift Tuesday morning. Thank goodness, this time in the boatyard wasn't half as stressful as the last one. Kyrie needed sanding and a couple layers of bottom paint, as well as the rebuilt drive reattached. It's all done! Two solid days of work, and then we go back in the water tomorrow afternoon. It's been a long time coming, but Kyrie will finally be able to travel under her own power again! While I can honestly say I've enjoyed our time in the marina--the pool, the yoga class, the seminars, meeting so many other people I've looked forward to meeting (did I mention we met the crew from SV Totem for the first time? Talk about feeling like you've met your idol!), having so many kids for our kids to meet and play with--it's past time to cast off those docklines again and get out to explore some more. There's a lot more to see out there, starting with a lot more of Mexico...