Doing laundry in Mexico

What I saw was a small pond fed by an underground spring.  Surrounding the pond were flat rocks.  I am sure I had a look of horror on my face when I realized this was the laundromat.  There were a few women there already on their knees scrubbing their clothes on the rocks.  In front of them was a rail made out of a fallen tree where they would hang their clothes to help drip some of the water out.  Next to the pond was a square of bricks creating a roofless shelter.  You climbed inside to get to the underground spring.  This is where the people came to get their drinking water.  They would bring their horses weighed down with big jugs or they would use two five gallon buckets hanging at each end of a stick by ropes which went across their back.  The women also carried their laundry in this fashion.  I eventually learned to adopt this way of carrying water and laundry as it was alot easier than the trying to look cool way.  I decided I was not going to let them see I was a lazy American.  I learned there is a technique to washing clothes on rocks and I was terrible at it.  They showed me as best as they could with the language barrier how the process went but I was useless.  I tried my best and then it was time to go.  No problem.  This is when I realized carrying a bucket of wet clothes up the side of a mountain especially when you are not used to the altitude is not so easy.  I was not feeling so cool now, all dressed up, panting like a dog trying to get up a hill.  I was desperately trying to keep them from seeing that I was dying.  Yeah, good luck with that.  Finally, I made it to the top after hiding behind a few trees to catch my breath and cry.  We then hung out our clothes in the yard the old fashioned way to dry.  Some people took me out to explore some nearby caves.  The Grutas de Cacahuamilpa National Park.  The caves are on the side of a cliff.  You climb down stairs built out of the cliff to get to them and pass by water falling from the cliff as you get to the caves.  I'm not much into caves but I was very interested and overwhelmed by the enormity of these caves.  They are one of the largest cave systems in the world.  At the end of the path that they created was a cross.  The story is of an Englishman who came here in the early 1900's to explore the cave.  He fell breaking his leg unable to move.  His dog went to the entrance and howled looking for help.  Due to their superstitious beliefs the people that heard the dog thought the man had died and that it was his ghost.  Therefore he was left to die.  They eventually found his remains as well as those of his dog lying next to him.  The story is they buried them exactly where they found them.  The story I found with the link below differs slightly from what I remember. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutas_de_Cacahuamilpa_National_Park
Once out of the caves you can continue going down winding steps to the river with two mouths.  This is actually two separate underground rivers that come out of the cliff next two each other each creating their own waterfall.  It is absolutely beautiful and there are so many yellow butterflies on the trees they look like flowers at first glance.  I was also taken to get honey from the hives on some cliffs.  They got the honey by taking a............................................

El Santo Desierto Del Carmen

I ended up in a small village on top of a mountain in Central Mexico.  The only way up was a ride on an old SUV type vehicle from the town one hour below.  They would not leave until it was packed full of people including the roof which also had animals that the passengers had bought at the market.  It was a dirt road so traveling to the top was quite a blast.  Halfway up the road was a waterfall with a small pool at the bottom that drained under the road creating another waterfall on the other side.  This was all so fascinating to me especially being from the islands.  What a completely different world!  Once to the top you enter the village of tiny brick streets.  The town was built by monks who were looking for a retreat to get away from the world.  They began building the church in the 1500's bringing in laborers from other parts of the country who eventually settled there creating the town.  The church was built by cutting blocks out of the cliffs from different parts of the mountain.  The cedar trees that were planted in the 1700's (when the church was completed) along the main road that leads to the church, are still there today.  I was there once when one of the trees fell and the town all went and made use of it by building furniture out of the wood and using it for their houses.  A wall was also built around the entire town to keep out intruders and the "bad people".  Parts of the wall still exist in several parts of the mountain.  I ended up staying with a family living in a one room house with their nine children and 3 beds.  The kitchen was separate from the house and consisted of sticks woven together and the inside was lined with feed sacks held in place with bottle caps.  They did not have a stove and all cooking was done over the fire.  I needed to do laundry the next day and was told to go with the wife.  Mind you I did not speak Spanish at this time and I was young and stupid.  I'm still young and stupid.  I was trying to figure out why the hell would they put the laudromat way out in the middle of woods after following her in silence for an eternity.  Ackward......  That was when I saw....................
Video of El Carmen 2010

Back home in the Keys

We went through the mangrove channels exploring and ended up finding a plane that had recently crashed.  Dad wanted to check it out and ended up falling and cutting himself on the broken glass.  We headed back slowly and were checking out one of the boiling holes when my brother pointed out Larry the Lobster.  Mom immediately put her snorkel gear on and caught him.  He had probally lived there for who knows how many years.  Larry ended up being dinner for six.  My mom brother and I were also exploring and finding key lime trees and coconut trees.  We took the husks off of the coconuts with hammers and screw drivers while holding the coconuts with our feet like little monkeys.  Mom made coconut pie and we made key lime aid.  There were caves on the island that a family used to live in back in the 1960's.  They had different parts of the caves that they used as bedrooms, ect and an oven they carved out of the rock.  We spent the rest of the year sailing the Bahamas, away from the rest of the world.  Eventually we made it back home to the Keys started going to school again and getting back into the routine of the real world.  Mom and Dad ended up getting a divorce after returning and we lived with our mom on a sailboat called Mariah.  Mariah was a steel sailboat built by some Australians to travel around the world.  We lived on Mariah for awhile before moving onto an old 75 ft yacht named Nepenthe.  She was built in 1912 I believe, made out of Dade County Pine which is now extinct.  She had 2 floors.  The top floor included the wheelhouse and a large room we used as the living room.  Downstairs had 3 bathrooms, engine room, kitchen, large dining room, 2 small bedrooms and the master bedroom.  All the doors had the old brass and crystal knobs. She bought the boat from a man named Russell Niedhawk.  His wife had died before I met him but she had written a book called Charlotte's Story.  A true first-hand account of their lives on Elliot Key during the mid 1930's and their struggles to survive on an isolated key with rum-runners, smugglers, local Conch spongers, and an assorted cast of characters. With no running water or electricity, they had to make do by finding things on the beach, making tools, surviving the mosquitoes and fishing for food.   The story culminates with their struggles to survive the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.  My home life was not the best at this time and I eventually bought a houseboat to live on.  I was not 18 but had my boat close to my mother's.  I ended up going to Mexico on a trip and falling in love with a little town called El Santo Desierto Del Carmen.  A small village on top of a mountain in Central Mexico.

Getting to the Bahamas

After weeks of preparing the boats we were ready to leave.   We sailed up the coast to Miami to a small harbour in Bill Baggs State Park.  We stayed for a few days waiting for the weather to be clear in order to cross.  They also planned to cross at night in order to get to the Bahamas during the day.  In the meantime we spent our days jumping from the mast and watching schools of Eagle Rays swim by.  We would go ashore and play in the forest of Australian pines or go to the beach.  We pulled anchor after a few days just before dark and off we went.  They chose Bill Baggs as it was a direct route to Grand Bahama Island.  My brother and I stayed awake as long as we could but the night was uneventful so we eventually went to sleep.  We woke up the next day still in the middle of the ocean with flying fish all around us.  By mid afternoon we could see Grand Bahama Island.  The water was so clear and littered with sand dollars and conch.  This was something you did not see in the Keys.  We went into the marina to check in with immigration.   My parents friends decided to stay docked up for the night and my parents decided we would anchor out.  Once anchored we immediately jumped in the water to snorkel and check things out.  We went to sleep that night only to wake up sideways in our bunks.  Apparently the tide was low.  Very low.  My dad had us all sleep out on the deck that was leaning out of the water trying to balance the boat so the other side would not go under.  First day in the Bahamas and we are already going to sink our boat.  That never happened again.  We stayed in Grand Bahama for a few days which was uneventful.  All we cared about was snorkeling, catching lobster and fishing.  I'm not sure the name of all of the islands, but Guana Cay is the first island I remember going to.  My mom, brother and I decided to go exploring.  This resulted in my brother and I getting poisonwood.  Just like poison ivy. It was awful.  My brother and I found a tiny kitten on Guana Cay.  One of my parents friends had just lost her cat so we brought it back to the boat.  She fell in love with her and she named her Guana.  She had that cat until she grew old.  We sailed on to another island called Royal Island.  It was privately owned and you were not allowed to go on it but people did anyway.  There were orchards of key limes, oranges and sugar apples as well as a tamarind tree.  There was also a 2 story abandoned house that we played in jumping on the old furniture until we scared the mice and found a nest of babies in the couch we were jumping on.  There were paths all through the island.  One of them took you to other side of the island which had a cement dock built into a square to help trap and catch bait fish.  We took advantage of that and cast netted for the baitfish.  We sailed along the island chains fishing, lobstering and collecting conch.  I had a ritual of catching a fish every morning for breakfast.  I'd take the scales off, throw it in the frying pan and make a side dish of rice.  I had a pet hermit crab whom I named Sinbad.  I would collect shells for him to change into and he loved peanut butter.  Eventually we ended up in a harbour at an island (the name I do not remember) where there were so many sea turtles, we were afraid to go in.  This is also where we found a small crashed plane and the biggest lobster (Larry) ever in what they called the boiling holes.

Sailing, fishing and windsurfing

Eventually my parents figured out the whole sailing thing.  Ran aground a few more times, but it's all a part of the process.  We eventually anchored in the Big Basin off of the Lorelei in Islamorada.  The Lorelei Tiki Bar became our home.  We discovered people dropped coins and jewelery in between the cracks on the dock.  Especially by the washer and dryer units and the cigarette machine.  We'd be on our hands and knees between people sitting at the bar.  I think they were used to us and drunk so they paid no attention to us.  Eventually, it became a war between my brother and I.  Always fighting over who got a certain spot.  He was smarter than I was and bought something called a grabber.  I was still putting together two straws with a stick of gum.  I stole the grabber at one point and he began locking it up.  Then of course there were the celebrities that hung out there at the time.  Baseball great Ted Williams was always there as he lived down the street.  Robert Garner and George Hamilton frequented while in town shooting a movie.  John Denver frequently went out fishing from there.  And of course George Bush Sr. later on fished from there as well.  I have a story about him but I'll save that for later.  Finally, my parents decided they had enough sailing experience to cross over to the Bahamas.  We pulled up anchor and sailed away.  We anchored off of some of the islands on our way up the coast, fishing, swimming and actually taking baths in the ocean.  We sailed up to West Palm Beach and anchored off an island called Peanut Island.  It was surrounded by a beach with thousands of pink clam shells and a hill in the very middle with a pine forest.  We played there for a few days before it was time to cross the ocean.  This is where I discovered I get sea sick.  I remember we put messages in a bottle, tossed them in the ocean and I proceeded to puke.  So we spent several nights in our tiny boat and little outboard motor with our cat and dog trying to get to the Bahamas.  The dog at one point fell in and we had to turn around to rescue him.  After several attempts my parents realized they did not know what they were doing and we headed back to Islamorada.  My brother and I were home schooled up until this point.  So after a long break of not going to school we had to get up early, dinghy in and walk to the bus stop.  After awhile we ended up docking our boat at the Lorelei and living there for quite sometime.  My parents and their friends would have sailing regattas.  I think it was my dad that started the water balloon fights.  All the boats would sail up close and chuck water balloons at each other.  My dad ended up rigging a balloon launcher off of the stays of the mast with a plastic bowl and elastic bands.  One time I went to go launch it when the wind shifted and the boom hit me knocking me into the water.  I was very afraid of open water and specifically remember being terrified until they could come back and get me.  You have to move your legs to stay afloat but want to curl up into a little ball to try and be less desirable for the sharks.  Often my parents and their friends would anchor their boats off of Cotton Key (an offshore island) to celebrate the holidays.  It was so much fun jumping from boat to boat getting into every one's liquor cabinets.  Special times with my dad that I remember the most were spent fishing.  I specifically remember one day catching 40 snapper and just having a blast.  There was a barracuda that kept eating our fish and at one point I was reeling in my fish I had hooked as fast as I could so the barracuda would not get it only to have it's head hit me in the face as the barracuda had bitten it in half.  We used to take our little boat out to the shallows and snorkel to catch lobster with a net and a stick.  We became experts at finding them and it was almost addictive.  We always turned it into a competition.  Who had the most and the biggest.  Back then you could also often see what they call lobster trains.  This is a line of hundreds lobsters going out at dusk to feed.   My parents bought a windsurfer which my brother and I would take out.  The feeling of being that close to the water and going so fast with the saltwater spray was incredible.  You tend to get tunnel vision and block out everything around you.  It is a natural high and all you can focus on is going faster.  Sometimes dolphins would come up and swim with you.  It was a little scary at first because they were so much bigger than you, but you just kept going.  You tried not to turn or move much because you did not want them to leave.  We got so good at it and were asked to do a photo shoot for a windsurfing book.  I think we were 11 and 12 at the time.  My parents then decided that "Lawanda" was too small of a boat for us and bought a 35 ft wooden Bahamian ketch named Taniko.  My parents made plans to sail to the Bahamas in Taniko with two other couples and their boats.  They were very experienced sailors and had already been several times.  Alot more preparing went into the process this time.  They decided exactly where we would sail across from and also began cooking and canning meals such as chicken and meats.  This time we were really going to do it.

Seeing the ocean for the first time

Off we went in our Ryder rental truck with all our possessions, including our German Shepard and Siamese cat.  We drove to Dallas first, where my dad sold his Jaguar to a family that had a game room downstairs with video games and pool tables.  That is the only part I remember from the drive until we got to the Keys.  Seeing the ocean for the first time was incredible.  I was absolutely fascinated with the smell of it and the sound of the seagulls.  Anyone who has experienced this knows what I am talking about.  The ocean is magical.  I have no idea how we ended up in Islamorada.  My parents found a couple selling a 26 ft mahogany sailboat that had been used for racing.  The name was Lawanda.  Stupid name for a boat.  So.....my parents, my brother and I as well as the cat and the dog moved onto this tiny little boat.  Needless to say we no longer had our own rooms.  We each had a bunk with the typical foam mattresses covered in canvas in the back of the boat.  His bunk was on one side of the steps mine was on the other.  And of course, no TV and no phone.  The coolest thing about the whole scenario is my brother and I could not swim.  Imagine a little kid in the middle of the friggin' ocean, seeing it for the first time and not being able to swim.  My parents were trying to teach us so they threw those stupid orange life vests on us (not fashionable) and had us get in the water.  That totally freaked me out.  It was murky and I had watched Jaws before leaving Colorado.  I knew a shark was going to bite my legs off.  My parents had never sailed before or knew anything about boats.  I think that is awesome.  I credit them for being so brave and doing something others would have been to afraid to do.  Especially with a family.  We were anchored off of the basin where Worldwide Sportsman in Islamorada is today.  The first time we tried to sail out of the basin we ran aground.  I saw a pink bird once in the shallows.  My parents thought I was a retard and had imagined it.  Turned out it was a roseate spoonbill and I was not retarded.  It was winter time for the Keys, but being from Colorado we were in our shorts.  It turned out to be a very cold winter in the Keys.  Fish were floating up on shore dead.  It was a good opportunity for my brother to walk around with a stick poking their eyes out.  My parents ended up becoming good friends with the couple that they bought the sailboat from.  They owned Calvert Sails and and it turned out they were pro windsurfers.  Thus our introduction to the world of windsurfing.     

Dallas to The Florida Keys

I was born in Dallas, though normally do not admit it as it is way cooler to say you are from The Florida Keys.  I also was simply born there, no ties and my parents moved while I was still a baby.  A year later my brother was born somewhere in Oklahoma.  Dallas is way cooler.  We then moved to Colorado Springs.  Great memories.  I loved camping in the mountains, fishing for trout, sledding and watching the dog play with porcupines.  We lived in a barn that was converted into a house.  We had chickens and ducks.  The mean old lady (she hated kids) that owned the property lived in a mansion which she allowed to be over run by raccoons.  She actually had a room in the house dedicated to them called the Raccoon Room.  There was a pasture with a not so nice horse named Abe and a nice mule named Molly.  Why this is important I do not know.  Abe did break my arm.  I was trying to catch a rabbit.  I was running after it in the pasture when I heard Abe's hooves.  I kept thinking, "Don't fall."  I fell.  The farm also had goats, more chickens and ducks, geese and a blind bassett hound.  My mom used to try and get us to drink goats milk.  I think because we were poor?  Goat's milk is gross.  My parents used to have this little machine they would put duck eggs in.  For some reason I thought they were trying to make yogurt, apparently it was an incubator.  There was tippee on the property my brother and I used to play in and an apple tree in the back yard.  Sometimes Abe would get out of the pasture to come eat apples and scare the jeepers out of us.  We learned when going through the pasture to run as fast as we could to the fallen tree in the middle of it.  Abe would run after us and sniff around the fallen tree trying to eat us.  He'd get tired, leave and we would run the rest of the way.  There was a horse skeleton off one of the paths, that gave me nightmares.  I still remember my dream of the pasture full of enormous buttermilk pancakes with pools of strawberry syrup.  I was in heaven.  The horse skeleton came alive and it and the mean old lady (who hated kids) chased us.  I think that was my first nightmare.  There was an old hayloft in the pasture we used to play in.  I remember us jumping off the top and finding a Victory Dime from the 1800's in the dirt.  That started my obsession with collecting coins which was later stolen including my precious dime, but that is a later story.  Asparagus grew wild where we lived so of course my parents fed us that as well.  My dad used to catch garden snakes and put them in the aquarium.  Thus I think my fascination with reptiles.  He also at one point had a black widow in a jar, which I think the cat knocked over and killed.  Then, one day, my dad had a dream to buy a sailboat and travel around the world.  We packed everything into a rental truck including my dad's old convertible Jaguar.  I'm not sure if my parents had any idea where we were going.