The air is still and dry this morning on the banks of the Rio Grande.  The dawn chorus of  bird song, coyote yelp, rooster crow, and dog bark which commenced not too long after the last strains of the Mexican Saturday night fiesta music faded has drifted off into the pink sky. All that is left is the sound of the bugs and the whistling birds that have been perched above our tent since we got here.  The river water is muddy, but smooth as glass and there are two majestic white egrets fishing a little ways down stream.  The tents were a flurry of paper cards this morning as we celebrated Saint Valentine’s Day.  They were delighted to receive a Reeses peanut butter heart.  Tony wrote me a story.  I wrote him a song.  He handed me a dozen roses in the store yesterday, kissed me, and then put them back on the rack.  We’ve never been much for the commercialized celebration.

Yesterday ended up being a resting and cleaning day.  It turns out that “Alamo, Texas” is not THE Alamo and we were very disappointed to learn that we are fully 250 miles off the mark for seeing the historic landmark.  Sometimes we miscalculate.  So, instead of “remembering the Alamo, we washed tarps and mopped tent floors, sorted through boxes of emergency supplies and deep cleaned the van.  The children took full advantage of the large field beside the river and they ran and played all manner of child game, to the great delight of the crowd of grandparents who winter here.  They even got to swim away the late afternoon in the shade of banana trees while Daddy worked from his hammock and I wrote a million postcards… okay, twelve, but it felt like a million.

Our only neighbours are not awake yet, Phillip and Patricia are from Quebec and turn out to be even younger than they look.  An intrepid pair, at eighteen, they’ve picked cherries in BC all summer (“Where we met,” says Phillip with sparkles in his eyes as he rubs the top of Patricia’s foot with his own)  and have driven this far south in a rickety little car with a crack in the frame just behind the passenger side wheel.  They don’t even have a tent to their name and have spent the last few days trying to sort out how to make it to Costa Rica, since it’s obvious that their car won’t make it.  We invited them to dinner last night, which they devoured with starving-student-traveler gusto and we swapped stories in a mixture of French and English.  Patricia asked us if we would take her as far as the border of Guatemala so that they would only have to pay one bus fare and Phillip would meet her there.  We politely declined.  Soaking in the hot tub later, waiting on our laundry, we wondered aloud what we would do with her when Phillip, inevitably, did not show up.  They’re living on love and on the adventure of a lifetime… they’ll probably survive.  “My parents, they are a leeettle… how do you say it?  Nervous,”  said Phillip with a cavalier shrug of the shoulders.  I’ll bet.  I’m a little nervous and they’re not my kids!  They gifted the children with a half bag of oranges that they’d mistaken for clementines and decided they did not like.  We gifted them with our extra dry noodle soups and some canned goods.

The children are disassembling the tent.  Ezra just came to report that, “Mom, Gabe told everyone to shut up!”  They aren’t quite working like their usual well oiled machine yet, but, this is only the first camp breakdown of the trip.  We’re hoping to hit the border by nine this morning, leaving lots of time for the usual circus act that is crossing into Mexico by car.  Our documents are in order, our vehicle papers are sorted, there SHOULD be no problem.  I was awake most of the night practicing my Spanish responses to the usual problems.  We’re headed to Ciudad Victoria tonight, an industrial city in the northern part of the country.  It will be a good place to get our boots on the ground before pushing on through the countryside toward Mexico City by the end of the week.  Internet will be sketchy at best, so if you don’t hear from us for a few days at a time, don’t worry, we’re just drinking bottled water and eating lots of fresh tortillas!