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.