Settling In, 2018

My second winter in Mexico is shaping up to be quite different from the first. While last year I spent the first month in a lovely guesthouse in a 19th-century neighborhood of Merida, this year some friends and I rented a beach house. Unfortunately, the friends were unable to travel at this time because of medical problems, so for now I am inhabiting a gorgeous three-bedroom, five-bathroom house on the Gulf of Mexico by myself, with property caretakers whose English is even more limited than my Spanish.

It's tough.

 The street address of the house is Calle ("street," for those with no Spanish) 15, but the entry is actually off of Calle 17, pictured below.

Yes, this is a part of the world where sand streets still exist. I had not walked on one since a long-ago Florida girlhood, but today I followed Calle 17 to Chicxulub Puerto's downtown. This village is welcoming to tourists, as evidenced by the many elegant houses found along the waterfront, but it is still a small town of a few thousand inhabitants. Visiting the central market after a morning spent on an editing project, I discovered that the loncherias were all in the process of closing at 1:00 PM. 

Undaunted, I took the recommendation of a couple of elderly gringas and visited a nearby fish restaurant, where the house special of rice and shrimp with fried plantains was both delicious and filling (if not particularly healthy). 

But the mystery of Calle 15 had not yet been solved, so I followed a side street past Calle 17, finally realizing that this is the mysterious missing street.

 Tire tracks in wet sand confirmed it,

but  Calle 15 has one little quirk.

At high tide, it's under water.