Feb 2024 Travel: GDL

We have been wanting to travel with Chad and Bailey for a while now. Chad is an old friend and my current employer. We have worked together now since 2004. This is the first time we traveled together and it turned out to be a lot of fun.

We rented a couple apartments in Zapopan in Guadalajara for a long weekend. I arranged a driver to be with us for our entire trip – available when needed. It was a great trip.

We flew in on Friday (direct flight from PHX, 2 hours) – rushed from the airport to a private cooking class where we learned to make a Oaxacan dish.

As we were running late – and the airport was about an hour to our destination, we had to do about twice the speed limit to make it in time. Fortunately, we made it in time (I figured we had a 50/50 chance we’d make it alive).

The meal was great. Also, our class came with unlimited tequila, which probably guaranteed whatever we made would end up great.

Next day we decided to travel north to the little village of Tequila. Yun and I have been here before years ago and it was a lot of fun. We ended up doing the same tour at the Jose Cuervo distillery that we had done before. It was just as much fun as the first time.

We had a great lunch and then toured around the town. There was an indigenous festival where a group of men swing upside down from a pole. Odd, but fun.

Tequila is such a fun place to visit. It’s maybe an hour north of GDL, but with traffic, it can take some time and we mostly slept on the way home. Well, they slept and I kept our driver entertained.

On Sunday, we did some charro lessons. Charros are Mexico’s attempt at a sort of knight class. They look like mariachi on a horse. We got some horse riding and lasso lessons and a lot of history. It was actually fun (I wasn’t much optimistic).

After watching the charro club do their thing – we departed to head downtown and tour around the center of town. I don’t recall ever doing this before – even though I once stayed in GDL by myself for months.

Later in the evening, we ended up going to an Atlas soccer game. I’m not much into the futbol, but it turned out to be quite a lot of fun. We had pretty spectacular seats and it was a great game. I would do it again for sure.

This was a really fun trip. A bit exhausting as no time for rest, but a really helpful distraction.

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camper stat

Mostly done. Orlando came up to work this weekend. Since I got the truck this last week, I wanted to try and get the camper done as quickly as possible.

There’s always something more but we really did make progress this weekend.

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Tacoma Club

Matt stopped by the office moments ago with a text message:

Saddly the truck they inherited a few months back is not redeemable, but not saddly, they upgraded to a 3rd Generation Tacoma.

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piñata cake

Our friend Stacey made Yun a piñata cake and her husband made tacos del pastor. Both were spectacular.

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45!

45 today. We had a nice dinner at Sulivans. Tim and Kim happened to be there at the same time, so we got a drink together after dinner. The treated us to some spectacular tequila.

We are taking my boss and his wife to Guadalajara in a couple weeks to celebrate both Yun and his birthdays. That trip will include a visit to the small town of Tequila. We have been there before and loved touring the Cuervo distillery.

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round 2

This has been a rough week.

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chicken coop

We started to remove the chicken coop today. That was quite a task, but will be nice to get it out of here. Yun’s dad wants it for his chickens.

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Elgin Christmas

We spent last weekend at a cabin we rented in Elgin. It was a really nice break from the work madness. I slept a lot – 4 hour naps daily. It was all so very refreshing.

This was our first trip we these new dogs. We had so much space to ourselves these guys could run endlessly without leashes. They seemed maximally happy.

Elgin is an hour and change SE from Tucson, so it makes for a fun trip with little travel. I’d go back for sure.

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8 new tanks

I put together eight new hydroponic tank’s this morning with multiple aeration stones wach. I have one pump that runs all 8.

It is starting to appear that aeration does a lot better than Kratky and also requires less filling of the individual jars. At this point I’m inclined to give away the jars as it’s too much up keep on a larger scale. The root development is also quite different, so the transition into the aerated tanks could be a problem.

32 plants switched over. The tanks aren’t very deep, which seems ideal in principle, but that may be a challenge down the road if roots get out of control.

My largest tank is doing the best.

And my first (and much smaller tank) is doing the worse. Though I wonder if it is due to the weak a bubbles. I may add more stones today and see what happens.

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hot air balloon and pyramids

We were up early this morning, but it turned out to be worth. We had such a nice experience on the hot air balloon today…we had to wait a bit for the mist to go away and then launched with about 50 other balloons.

They have no control other than up and down, so 50 balloons just float over a small town and then land wherever they can.

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