El Life

It amazes me that some people that have such a good  life that they don't seem to notice , maybe that's a good thing because they're just to busy...but me, I got a great life and I daily reflect on it and thank MP and the world. Many , many, years ago I had horribly defining thing happen in my life and it took only about 25 or 30 years for the dust to settle but when it did I decided to do my best to appreciate and savor this gift of life...and that's what we did yesterday, today and going to do tomorrow. BUT, first let me get the business part of this blog over with, the fishing report. ...Well, it's cold. I start the morning with temps in the 50's but there's plenty of snook around. Just yesterday I lost yet another huge one before we left for an adventure and I caught several in the week. My friend Tim Lockwood caught the biggest Pargo of the year and I'm embarrassed to say I don't have a pic due to facebook/blogger issues. Here's a few pics , us with our friends the Radkes from Kenai river Alaska and hows about the sunrise rebound we had after the last storm blew through,,,magic,

That's a pic of me at 5:45 Saturday morning...ya gotta want to do it ! And the reward,

The Lockwood's are here and Jen was interested to do the first Friday Art Walk so they met us downtown at the LaSiesta Hotel where we like to escape for a night every so often. As life in Jeff's world goes at check in I told a young man that we live in Cerritos but routinely come to the Hotel for a refresher night. Well, his name was Moses and he said his dad does Finger Paints at the Cerritos Market and I said " you're Antonio Lopez's son" and sure enough he is the son of one of the founding father of Team X and a wonderful friend of ours. So after many good laughs he gave us the keys to room 214 which turned out to be the only suite in the Hotel....mucho gracias Moses, you're the best.

The Art Walk is cool...but a real extension of the ' happy wife, happy life ' philosophy. So me and Tim talked cycles, fishing, carpentry and just wiled away the night as the girls went from gallery to gallery. At one gallery which was of course my favorite we got a shot of Tequila and engaged an educated guy about U.S. expansionism and Mexican History.  Here's MP and Jen and then a pic of Tim as he walked circles in the street kicking rocks while waiting for his wife to unload the check book.

MP had won 2500 peso on a Super Bowl board so I new this deal was going to take some time. Everywhere we went we ran into people we new and THATS a cooool thing. Our friends Grace and Gill were selling their Sea Glass art at the same place I took this pic of the Zebra. I asked the painter if anyone had every gotten Vertigo looking at her Zebra....she said " just you ".....mmmm, well she wasn't being snobby but she sure could do a great imitation of it.

When I told MP ' there's that glass of wine you've been wanting ' and we staged this pic the ' artist ' said that if I didn't buy it she'd have to charge me for the pic...but she wasn't being snobby just a kind of confrontational type of sense of humor, lots of people got that....right ????

How about an oil paint of Olas Altas with the LaSiesta in the lower left...Note to blog, next time take ear plugs, the party on the beach never ends but the weirdest thing is the people cruising the drag. They do it from round-a-bout to round-a-bout just like we did on Helena Avenue in High School. But, we didn't have any guys that were alone in a sedan with the trunk open to expose 4 foot speaker boxes fueled by 300 amps of  juice....and then there's the Razers...and them Harley guys, don't they sell mufflers at the Harley store ?

And we found Hugh Hefners Groto....just a few things missing but still really cool.

We had Mariscos at a beachfront place called Barracrudas. It was pretty funky and once again kinda short on gringos. I had a Crab tower tostado with raw shrimp and octopus and MP had a really cute octopus pizza and Tim and Jen had fried shrimp. I enjoy a good Tequila, usually just a shot before supper and this place had,,,,well,,,,none, Compadre for the price of Cazzedores, it's  the only thing about that place that needs fixing.I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when we were treated to a great fireworks show as sat on our balcony for some late night people watching. Perfecto, what an end to a great day.

How exciting. We got up this morning to do our walk in a new place. We headed over to Zaragoza Park for the organic Market and MP bought some excellent hard cheese. We didn't stay long, after Art Walking and Organic Strolling I'd had just the right amount of touchy feely...I'm gonna save the universe because I'm the center of it kind of people.

So we decided to size up Ice Box Hill and then go up and over that baby. Everyone in Mazatlan knows the huge mountain in the middle of town with all the Cell Towers and houses that seem to be glued to the cliffs.  We start out walking neighborhoods and then neighborhoods within those neighborhoods as we look up and run out of roads along the base of the mountain. Pretty soon we have just cement trails and little looky see spots,

It's really early so as we move along we whisper to each other. we finally look up and around every alley and possibility and finally spot the stairs that we new had to be close. At one point we had the biggest and loudest rooster you've ever seen cacklin away 2 feet from my face. I was worried about MP's new knee but she said it's all good, carry on.

Strictly OSHA approved. MP said going up was alright but she was hoping we'd find a road for the way down....well we didn't. Here's the top and the pic of the tower will tell all you Mazalatecos where we were at, it's place I always wanted to visit.

Of course there was a road at the top but, it went back to the north from which we'd come. So there was only one thing to do and that was find the trail and stairs. Now this next set was a little intimidating, real steep, really high risers with a narrow foot tread and of course no hand rails. I offered to go below MP and belay her but she trooped on....slowly and safely. It would have been really easy to do a Carl Wallenda on these babies.

It was probably the equivalent of about 15 stories according to MP's app...So it was just like we like , interesting exercise together. On the lower levels we actually came across handrails....

 So we go to La Fonda de Chalio for breakfast on the ocean. We've eaten there many a time and the gardens  they have attract bees which always freak me out but this morning they were everywhere....they were landing and leaving the table and even on my food. And of course people that know me know that I'm highly allergic and have had  a couple really scary bee stings here in Mazatlan. Sooooooo you can only imagine that as I confessed my discomfort MP just said " hey , there's nothing they want from so just ignore them ( easier said than done ) . Then on my second or third whine she opened this pack of Smuckers Strawberry Jelly and put it 5 feet away from me to bait this insect that Ty Tobias always tells me is so important to the food chain away from our table. It got creepy real fast....but, one of my mantra's is.....' you just gotta want to do it '