Cain Manor

I have finally extracted myself from Oaxaca. I’m pretty glad to be back on the road. One thing I found in Oaxaca that makes me happy (but most of you won’t understand) is VI for windows. That means I can write this using VI!! VI, those of you not in the know ask, what is vi? It’s a Unix text editor. Anybody remember Word Perfect back in the day when you didn’t have a mouse. It’s kind of like that, but more primitive. What I like about it is that it’s fast, fast, fast, and I know it better than any text editor I know of. As a System Administrator, it’s very important to know as it’s on every system ever made, and it’ll always work, unless something is really, really wrong. If there any any emacs people out there, I say - get a life. To Summarize.. I’m a geek.
Continue reading ‘Oaxaca to San Cristobal’ »

OK - here are the pictures

I’m finally getting ready to leave Oaxaca, probably Sunday morning. This will probably be my last post for a while, so Enjoy.

My next destination is going to be San Cristobal de las Casas, which is supposed to be a wonderful town. From there, I’ll go to Palenque, (which is supposed to be fantastic) and on to Guatemala. Between San Cristobal and the border, there is a town called Las Margaritas. I’m gonna have to check that out. If it’s what I hope it is, I may never leave. What are the chances it’s the magical land of Margaritas, where all the women are barmaids, and the drinks are free. I was certainly disappointed in Casa de Peyote.
Continue reading ‘Finally Leaving Oaxaca’ »

The biggest fear I had about this trip was getting screwed on unemployment insurance. I’ve collected on since I left Wireless, except for one week I forgot to claim, and the week after (because it’s a hassle getting it started back up again.) Generally it’s a piece of cake, unless you get called in for a “Job Search Review.” What that means is that you have to go in person to the unemployment office, and they go over your last three job searches (which is one weeks worth.) If you miss that appointment, you have to go in and review all the weeks you missed, or else give back all the money they’ve given you. On the second of August, I got a notice in the mail that I was selected for a job search review, and the review was on the 17th of August. Peggy picked up my mail a day or two after I was supposed to be at the unemployment office. What does all this mean? I don’t know. Since I haven’t gotten unemployment insurance in the month of August, I should be OK, but that’s not the way the government works. It probably could mean a bunch of different things, none of them good. I currently don’t know what to do. Pay the money back. It’s 4 - 6K, which is a lot of money. Add to that I still have to get my front porch fixed, and it’s starting to look like this trip is going to turn into a race to South America. This is exactly my worse case scenario.

With that in mind, I think I’m going to spend more time driving, and less time trying to learn Spanish. I still think I’ll hole up on a beach in Costa Rica somewhere.

OK, I REALLY got it working this time. I tried it, and it works. I just needed to change cainmaor to cainmanor and it worked. Thanks to Austin for helping me on this.

What does this mean to the rest of you. Get a typekey account, and you can call me whatever names you like. Ha!

This was a pretty fun weekend. I saw a couple of things in the surrounding countryside that were pretty popular, and got to ride my motorcycle for a whole bunch of hours.

Cyrus was leaving on Sunday, and he wanted to see some of the local sights, so we took a local bus to Tule. The town (called Santa Maria El Tule) has a 2000+ year old tree. Initially I was sceptical about it being a big tree. In the Northwest, it’s hard to swing a dead cat without hitting someone that complains about you just having killed a cat. And when they step aside, you hit a big tree. So I’ve seen a lot of big trees (biggest cypress, biggest fir, etc.) But when I got there, it was one big tree. I’ll even go on record as saying it’s the biggest tree I think I’ve ever seen. It was huge. I’m glad my skepticisim was removed for a while.
Continue reading ‘Road to Hierve el Agua’ »

so you should be able to post comments once you have your typekey account, after I approve a comment from you. I’m not trying to be heavy handed, but it’s an anti-spam measure, which blogs suffer heavily from. Also, it’s the only way to post comments in the blog software I use without approving each, and every one.

If one of you guys who with a typekey account could check it and see, and drop me a line, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks,

Greg

Ever since crossing the border, I’ve been fascinated by the cars and motorcycles they have here. Most of the cars here are newer, which is different than the sterotype that people have.

The cars are pretty cool, and generally different. People with a LOT of money drive Suburbans, and generally only Suburbans. They are a large percentage of the traffic on the toll roads, since only rich people can afford the tolls. Most of the other cars are pretty economical, and some of them are just dang cute. I could see myself driving the Ford XA. One reason people drive the economical cars is that gas is a LOT more expensive here. It cost about $16/US to fill a relatively empty tank, compared with $10-12 for the US when gas prices were very high. Gas is taking a much larger chunk of my budget than I thought it would.

The bikes generally are older, and almost all of them are small - 125 or 150, with a few 250s. Yesterday (8/24/4) I saw my first Harley, followed by another one about 10 minutes later. Someone in town has a Ductati Dual Sport, and there are a few BMW F650’s in town. On Saturday ( 8/21/4 ) I saw about a dozen BMW’s pull into the Zocalo. They drove in from Mexico City for the night, taking the same road I took from Mexico Districto Federale. I guess that means it’s a pretty good road, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken it. They didn’t seem very social, so I didn’t chat long. On to the Pictures