Oct 11-13 Chilling in Queretaro

We spent the next couple of days hanging out with Sergio and his family.  We really didn’t do anything special, we had a BBQ, took the kids to the park and basically hung around.  Olivia had a great time playing with Sergio’s kids and we had a great time chatting and hanging around with Sergio and his wife Adriana.  As always they were lovely hosts making us feel like their home was our home.  They let us shower and do laundry and we just basically relaxed for a couple days.

Holly really likes Queretaro.  She likes that it is a bit modern city but not too crowded.  She likes that there is a full range of stores such as Costco, Walmart, HEB and full indoor malls.  She likes that there are even some small Chinese grocery stores.  There is a large Huawei factory in Queretaro so there are a decent number of Chinese living there.  Holly liked Queretaro so much that she started looking for apartments.  I had to bring her down to earth by pointing out that with the pandemic her dreams of staying in Queretaro were not going to turn out as she expected.  After all, while we had a couple of friends with kids in Queretaro, it wouldn’t be practical to hang out with them all the time.   After all, they got jobs and lives of their own.  Also the parks were still closed and although the malls were open it wouldn’t be wise to just hang out in the mall for a day like we could pre-pandemic.  We also wouldn’t want to just go out and wander around the city so much.  Most likely we would spend most of our time sitting in the apartment alone with occasional visits to friends.  In addition it is really hard to find an affordable place with secure parking for Rover.  Our RV is quite large so it is not something we could just park on the street for months at a time.

Our friends Matheu and Stacey had returned to Oaxaca and staying in an RV park with them would be safer and more fun. We each have our own homes so we would have our own space, the kids could go out and play with each other anytime they wanted without leaving the RV park.  Also the rent would be less than half what an apartment would cost.

I like to think of the Pandemic like any other danger, say car accident.  The chances of us individually being seriously injured or dying in a car accident are actually quite low although people are injured and die in car accidents every hour.  Neither one of us has ever been injured in a car accident after decades of driving but we still put on our seat belts every single time we get into the car.  We don’t speed too much no do we drive in dangerous conditions.  The chances of us catching Covid are actually quite low although people are catching Covid every hour.  But we still mostly practice social distancing and wear masks when we go out.  Like we avoid excess speeding we generally avoid large crowds.  After all the more people you meet the greater the chance of catching Covid.  This does not stop us from travelling, visiting friends or eating out but there is no reason to take excessive risks like going to a large music concert or something.

This is the way to travel, stopping for a few days in each location and meeting friends.  Sure seeing sights and having adventures is great but it is really connecting with locals and making friends that make travel special.  We could not stay too long at Sergio’s since he did not have a sewer dump so on Tuesday morning we said our goodbyes and headed back on the road.  Our first stop though was the small Chinese grocery store in Queretaro to pick up some hard to find Chinese food such as Chinese sausages and vegetables.  Then a quick lunch at a Chinese take out restaurant and then we were on the road to San Miguel.

It was only an hour’s drive to San Miguel but there was a health checkpoint.  Deya, our friend who lived in San Miguel had told us that she almost wasn’t let back into town once because she had to show ID saying that she lived there.  She advised us to say that we were on our way back to the United States and was just picking up a friend in San Miguel.  When we got to the check point the lady checked out temperatures and just waved us through when we told her we told her what Daya said we should say.

We had originally planned to stay at the tennis courts again but they seemed hesitant to accept kids this time due to the pandemic so we went to the Hotel San Ramon which charged us 3,005 pesos a week.  It was kind of strange returning to the Hotel San Ramon.  I sort of felt like we were going backwards and were not progressing.  I generally dislike going back the same way and here we were in the exact same spot as we were in the beginning of the year.  Regardless it was still a quiet and idyllic parking spot so we settled in for the week.