Coming to America

I’m not sure if the title of this post is more Eddie Murphy or Neil Diamond, but we are headed back to the States!  We’ll be there a month to visit with friends and family over the holidays while Adagio sits safely tucked into the marina here in La Cruz.  So, don’t expect any adventure posts from us for a while.  But, I am going to try and work on editing all of our video we shot over the summer, so maybe I’ll finally get some of that posted.

In the meantime, I want to catch you all up on what we have been doing!  We left San Blas on our way south toward Banderas Bay.  But, we stopped at two really neat anchorages on our way down – Chacala and Jaltemba.

Chacala is a beautiful bay with white sand beaches.  There are a few beachside restaurants and hotels, but the city itself is pretty sleepy.  We wandered through the cobblestone roads and hung out on the beach.

Our first night anchored at Chacala, a huge lightening storm came through.  We were the only boat in the anchorage, and so we crossed our fingers that the lightening would not find us.  When you are the only mast sticking up out of the water, you are just asking for it.  But, the storm finally passed and we got a decent night sleep.

The next day our friends on Kya arrived.  We had them over for cocktails (or as cruisers call them, sundowners) as well as a single guy on another power boat that showed up in the anchorage about the same time.  You can never have too many cockpit cocktail parties while cruising!

The anchorage got a bit rolly that night and we decided to follow Kya down the coast the next day to Jaltemba.  Jaltemba is the opposite of Chacala.  While Chacalca is calm and pleasant, Jaltemba is a cacophony of sights and sounds.

Jaltemba is a tourist destination for a lot of the Mexican cities nearby.  We were there on the weekend and got to see how the Mexicans party on the beach!  Families came early to the beach and set up for the day, and I don’t just mean beach chairs and picnic baskets.  There were huge tents, BBQ grills, giant stereos and speakers…you name it.  People literally moved to the beach for the day.

There were vendors everywhere, selling T-shirts, tourist items and lots and lots of food!  There were carts with skewers of fish and shrimp. Ice cream vendors.  Vendors with whole coconuts and pineapples.  If you were hungry, there was someone there to sell you something.

The most fun we had was watching all of the bands play up and down the beach. These weren’t rock bands.  Some were mariachi bands.  But, others were simply a group of different instruments (who walks around the beach with a tuba!) that walked up and down the beach offering to play for a tip.  You didn’t have to walk 100 ft before there was another band playing. So, you can imagine what that many different bands playing all at once sounded like.  It was crazy.

After a couple of days at Jaltemba, we finally made it to Banderas Bay.  Banderas Bay is a large bay that includes Punta Mita, La Cruz, Bucerias, Puerto Vallarta, and a few other cities and towns.  It is also home to a huge cruising community, most of which show up sometime in November or December and sail around the area until about May.

We were here for a few reasons, but one of those was that Mike’s family was coming to Puerto Vallarta to visit us for Thanksgiving.  We had a fabulous time with the family, and I know the kids loved the resort pools and jet skis.  Mike’s mom and nephew even went parasailing!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at the Vallarta Yacht Club, where they made all us wayward Americans roast turkey, dressing, cranberry, mashed potato and pumpkin pie.  It was almost like home.

We can see why some cruisers get “stuck” here, because there are so many things to see and do.  But, when we get back to La Cruz from visiting the States, we have big plans!

We’ve had to figure out where we are going to be next summer during the Pacific hurricane season.  Basically, we either have to go back north and spend another summer in the Sea of Cortez, or we have to head south.  So, we chose south!  We are headed to Central America.  We signed up for the Cruisers Rally to El Salvador which will take us to El Salvador by the end of March.  From there, we can spend the summer in Costa Rica and Panama safely out of the zone of the hurricanes.  We are really excited for this next step in our adventure!

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and gets to spend the time with friends and family.  Look for more adventures from us when we return in January!

~katie