The first full day back in San Miguel we just stayed in the RV relaxing and catching up on homeschooling. We didn’t feel the need to rush out to the town because we had been here before. San Miguel de Allende is a lovely quaint little town and was recently voted world’s best small city by Travel and Leisure magazine for the third time. It is a small city though with limited things to do other than walk around and admire the beautiful church, colonial buildings, cobblestone streets while enjoying a coffee at an outdoor café. So we did not feel a big rush to go out into town. Instead we just spent the day chilling. It was a bit of a strange feeling being back at the Hotel San Ramon, parked at almost the exact same spot we were at seven months ago. In some ways it felt like we had never left and that was kind of sad, as if we had not made any progress towards our goal of South America. In one way, progress didn’t really matter since we didn’t have a particular timeline to go to South America but in another way it was sad that after 10 months we were just over 500 miles from the US border, about the same distance as San Francisco to San Diego.
Our Ipad died the next day. It was not a big loss since it was a very old original Ipad and we had the new Ipad that we had bought in Texas less than a year ago. I had been wanting a larger tablet though for watching movies and was looking at the new Samsung Tab S7 Plus. In addition, Holly’s Galaxy 7 phone was due for replacement and the new Quest 2 VR had just come out. However, the newest electronics were not available for purchase in Mexico and came with a very high tax. Electronics in Mexico cost 20% more than in the US. I had seen on the internet that there might be Paquete services or courier services that would bring items over the border. They would have a US address where one could ship things and then they would drive it across the border and deliver it to wherever you are in Mexico. This would allow you got get items that are not normally available in Mexico. I spent all morning walking around San Miguel checking various shipping services before I found a company called La Conexión. They charged US$1 per pound and 17% of the value of the item for import fees. So with the Samsung Tab at $700, new phone which would probably be around $1,200 and a Quest 2 at $500 it would have cost us almost $450 for shipping and fees alone. Ouch. It might be better to wait to find someone who was coming to Mexico from the US to bring the items.
The next day Deya brought her kids Valentina and Ramses Jr. to visit us. Although it was cramped in Rover for entertaining guests the kids still had a good time playing with each other and I took them to the hotel picnic area to play while Deya and Holly caught up. The kids played like no time had passed although Ramses Jr’s English had improved a lot over the months we had been gone. Not too much had changed for Deya although she was now homeschooling her kids. Deya had sent her kids to private school but it had gone remote and Deya withdrew them since she would have had to spend her time monitoring the kids anyway so why pay? Everyone had a good time and Deya invited us to her house on Sunday.