shoestring gringa

I’ve never been very good about sticking to schedules, especially with housework, but the last few months I’ve done pretty well at washing the sheets and towels on Fridays.  So I was disappointed to discover the water was off this morning, and as if to put a complete kibosh on my laundry plans, it’s been drizzling.

We’re lucky here at the bottom of the town, because when the water goes out we still usually get a trickle for a while.  So I was able to fill a bucket for the toilet and a pitcher for the kitchen sink before it disappeared completely.

Interruptions in the water supply are fairly frequent in Mexico.  The best solution is to have a Rotoplas, one of those plastic water tanks, on the roof.   In areas where there are chronic water shortages, water tanks are indispensable.  In Progreso, Yucatan, there was never enough water for it to run during the day; everyone’s Rotoplas filled up a drop at a time overnight.   Here, however, it doesn’t happen too often.  Although we made a spot for a Rotoplas when we rebuilt the house, we ran out of money long before the time came to buy one.

The worst thing  about the water cutoffs is being caught unprepared.  I start feeling dirty and sticky and envisioning germs crawling all over everything the minute I know the water’s gone.   And not knowing when it will come back on — will I be able to make dinner (the big event of the day)?  We could go out for tacos of course, but for the thought that they don’t have water either…

Some kind of santizer is good to have around.  I use cheap rum in a spray bottle for hand cleaning during water outages.  We also use it to clean the tops of water bottles before putting them on the dispenser.

One suffocating August morning a couple years ago the water went out early in the morning and showed no signs of coming back as the day dragged on.  We had nothing but the spray bottle of rum and paper towels and became more miserable with each passing hour.  At about 3 p.m. a thunderstorm arrived.  We spent a couple minutes regretting the irony of all that water in the air and none in the faucets, before noticing streams of it pouring off our now-clean truck, and scrambled to get every container we could find under there to collect it, laughing hysterically and getting blissfully soaked in the surprisingly cold downpour.

I was amazed at the amount of water we collected in our small assortment of pots, pans, and buckets.  Enough to flush the toilet and wash for days!  But of course we never got to use most of it — the water came back on about an hour after the storm ended.

What’s the best map to use when traveling by car in Mexico?  I really have no idea — suggestions are always welcome!  My strategy is to always have a few on hand for whatever area you might be traveling through, and the more the better.

I have to confess our collection of maps is pretty haphazard, which may be why none of them seems very satisfactory — leftovers from a vacation fifteen years ago, giveaways that came with Mexican insurance, city maps of places we have lived or shopped, a large map of todo Mexico coated in tequila-resistant plastic, and an ancient, crumbling AAA map with an irreplaceable driving distance inset.  We do not own the finest examples of Mexican cartography.  And of course the older maps don’t reflect the enormous amount of road construction which has been done in recent years.

With that in mind, I’ll say that I’ve noticed numerous inconsistencies among these various maps, and it is always a comfort to be able to consult a second source.    The presence of secondary roads on a given map seems to be a complete crapshoot, so if you’re off the beaten path be especially sure to have a few.  Inaccuracies are also common;  I’ve seen roads shown going through towns miles distant from the actual ones.  Visual representations can also be misleading; on the map it appears you need to turn left at the junction to get to X, whereas in fact you must go straight, and you would have to make a hard right to stay on what appears to be the same road on the map.  If you get my drift.

When in doubt, ask a local.  It’s always safer than depending on maps, or signs for that matter.