Merida

I don't believe in the religious heaven, but I do believe that heaven shows up in moments here on Earth. And I encountered heaven in a beautiful shower at a courtyard-ed and shady hotel, with coffee, cold water free to drink, and functioning wifi. Clean rooms with towels and reading lights.

Actual reading lights! Not just a bared compact florescent stuck out of the wall. (We would stay in so many lovely rooms, plenty of hooks, nice towels, puffy pillows, pretty orange paint job. And the lighting would be that single naked compact florescent bulb. Go figure.) In addition to reading lights were two different soft fixtures set into the ceiling, and Jen and I flipped all the switches on and off, ooing with admiration. 

Anyway. Heaven would not have been so delicious if Jen and I had not spent the morning hunkered down in beast mode on the hot highway shoulder, navigating around belching old buses, making our way into and through the crowded bumpy streets of Merida. This city is our biggest yet (890,000 people or so) and looking at the map was like trying to make sense of some huge cross-stitch project. 

It was the end of the Jen and Sandra portion of the tour, and Merida was our Final Destination. 579 miles in total. Jen has been a truly wonderful companion: positive, patient, clever. And we were so often on the same wavelength with our needs and timing and preferences. 

And Jen flies out tomorrow morning and I have a week left here. I'm going to make a little loop to the beach towns around Merida and experience some solitude and relish more time in this colorful, sunny, and very friendly country. Of all places in the entire world to set off alone with your trusty bike and your beloved jar of peanut butter, the Yucatan peninsula is likely the best place out there. 

My biggest concern is not my "safety" (I have an entire peninsula of good-hearted people looking out for me, and I feel safer here than in many cities I've visited in the US) but instead about not speaking the language and not having someone to share meals with or recount the day to. Maybe this will be like a retreat. Maybe I will do a lot of writing. Will the pleasures of a bike trip be as wonderful if I can't be immediately describing and recounting them to my companion? Or will they became more poignant because of the heightened energy around them with no other focal point? 

For our non-biking post-arrival celebration day in Merida today, Jen and I did something you just don't do in the states. We walked to Walmart. Walked. In the states that would be asinine, walking through parking lots and strip malls. 

I'm a thoroughly co-op girl hippy dip: carless, all thrift-shoppy, and I hate Walmart. But here I go for the cultural curiosity. 

And in Merida there was a Walmart on the gorgeously leafy Paseo de Montejo, a wide boulevard of monuments and stunningly ornate french-style huge homes. And you want to walk along this pretty road, admiring the coconut palms and the wrought iron. And then you go into the Walmart, which happens to have a Tortilleria inside it (!?), and you buy fruit cocktail from the fruit buffet, after clandestinely stealing a piece of papaya off the serving spoon to test if it's possibly palatable, and you're floored that this cut fruit in Walmart is the sweetest juiciest stuff. 

And then you buy some mescal for your friends back home for $13 because you couldn't find mescal for an approachable price in any other shops in the city.