Molcajete Madness

The perils of drying your clothes on the line in Mexico.

In the absence of a dryer in our various residences overseas, Lori and I have been line-drying our clothes for the past five years. Because of the intensity of the sun most days in Sayulita, it makes a lot of sense here much of the year.

In all that time, this is the first time we’ve had issues with our drying rack falling over.

We’ve since fixed the issue with the help of a sun chair and patio table, but this rack has to be narrowest, worst designed laundry rack we’ve ever owned, bar none.

Another beautiful evening out at Playa Carricitos, our favorite Sayulita beach for catching a sunset.

Lately, we’ve been catching the sunset as we’re heading back for home, rather than on the actual beach like we had been over the past couple of months.

Once daylight savings time hits, we’ll have to start enjoying it from our rooftop after the boys go to sleep.

Chocobanana is one of the kids’ favorite weekend brunch places in town. Why, you ask?

A chocobanana comes with every kids’ breakfast. The boys usually split a kids plate, but the staff will often bring them each a small chocobanana. Lucky boys.

Off on a hike. Noe’s been asking to visit the Jungle Temple, so we made a detour to add that in before heading to the beach.

Caves Beach might be Noe’s new favorite beach. He seems to like the beach well enough, but the caves between the two beaches are obviously the real draw here.

Can we count this as five? If so, it would be a new record. I’ll be generous and say five.

Post-beach/hike drying machine.

Cleaning his shell collection in the backyard.

That Franken-sea-beast there is called a molcajete, sort of a Mexican take on hotpot or fondu. There are a lot of variations across the country in terms of what goes into a molcajete. Here in Sayulita, as you might imagine, it’s heavy on the seafood (though there are strips of steak in there as well. oh…not to mention the bacon wrapped poblano).

You pull a few chunks out, throw it into a blue corn tortilla, put some Chipotle sauce on it and have at it.

These bags are filled with leaves (compressed to the best of our ability).

We’re deep into dry season, which means “Fall” here in the northern tropics! And the almond tree that hangs over our wall reminds us of that fact every single day. Multiple times a day.

Noe and I made a routine of picking up the leaves in the front before heading off to school each morning. But before long, there were too many to collect in a morning. Then, the leaves started piling up to the point where we could hardly see our parking area.

Lori got fed up with the leaves at took it upon herself to fill the bags and get rid of them. It’s a common part of life in the northern U.S. in November, but something Lori and I haven’t had to deal with much living in the tropics.

Either way, it’s nice to see the driveway again.

Noe may have loved the molcajete even more than we did (especially the octopus). The kid loves seafood and will try just about anything, so no surprise there. Riley was initially not a fan…until he saw Noe devouring the octopus, of course.

Central Beach at sunset.

Oatmeal raisin scones!

Noe and I don’t bake together as much as we used to in Southeast Asia. Heck, we’ve been here four months and I think this might be the first time.

Our kitchen here isn’t as equipped as the ones we had in Laos and Cambodia, and we haven’t been very motivated to change that. After seven major moves in the past ten years, we just don’t have the interest we used to in acquiring housewares.

Washing the golf cart. Living on a dusty road and taking Noe to and from school via a dusty 10 minute drive to the edge of the jungle, it’s unbelievable how fast this thing goes from shiny to filthy.

We try and pull it into our compound as much as possible to help mitigate that, but most of the time we just sort of let it go. When neighbor kids started to write things in the dust, we decided it was time to give it a wash.