We had an AirBnb condo reserved for December 30th at Lake Chapala.  We’d paid for the campsite in San Miguel until the 28th….should we pay for another couple of days?  Should we hit the road?  If so, where would we go?  We had seen most of the places we had wanted to see and many more, but we were getting itchy feet…..we needed a plan.

After leaving the great spot we had in Morelia before Christmas we discovered that we had accidentally stolen the keys to the gates.  We had stayed there for the night, been gifted fruit, nuts, hot home made hot morning fruit drinks, all for 70 pesos, and had since seen that to get keys cut was like 15 or 20 pesos per key, and we had pilfered two of them from this giving man.

So, we decided to return to Morelia for the night and return the keys.  We arrived and our host recognized us immediately, but laughed when we told him we had returned to give him his keys back.  “No es necesario!”, he said, but welcomed us back and quickly found us a place to park for the night.

Not long after, a Roadtrek van arrived in the parking lot….aha!…other travellers.  We were soon engaged in conversation with Chantel and Gael from Quebec who had been on the road for several weeks and were planning on spending most of the winter in Mexico at various locales.

Later Derek and I decided to go out for dinner and tried two different places recommended on TripAdvisor, only to find the restaurants to be out of business.  We eventually found a place with a menu that suited us and were escorted in to find we were the only patrons in the restaurant…maybe they eat later in the evening here in Morelia?

Pizza was on the menu and it was what we were craving, maybe a nice salad to start.  The waiter came to take our order.  “Dos ensaladas, por favour”, “Si, si,” said the waiter, “y una pizza” (can’t remember which one we ordered).  “Ah, said the waiter, “no tenamos pizza” (we have no pizza).  Not, we don’t have the ingredients for the particular pizza you ordered, there just is not any pizza tonight…..”okay, necesito un minuto”….After spending a few more minutes with the menu Derek decided on a chicken dish and I on a pasta.  The waiter returned, and, ay, caramba, they didn’t have the pasta dish that I ordered.  New tactic…we asked, so what do you have?  We both ended up with a different variation on chicken.  The menu had described mine as chicken with ham and cheese.   I was expecting something cordon bleu-ish….what I got was a breast of chicken, with a piece of ham luncheon meat on top, with some cheese melted on top, and a little pile of plain spaghetti…..our meals, with 2 beer and 2 glasses of kind-of-inadequate wine, came to over 700 pesos, about $50 CAD…pretty expensive considering we could have had our fill of amazing tacos for one or two hundred pesos.  Lesson:  when in Mexico, eat Mexican food, and, in general, you will have a much better experience!

The next morning, after receiving fresh squeezed orange juice and toasted ham and avocado sandwiches, compliments of Ismael, the owner of the parking lot, we chatted some more with our new friends from Quebec.  By the time we were leaving, it felt like we were saying farewell to old friends.  Email addresses were exchanged, invitations to visit when in our respective provinces in Canada were made, and we left Morelia for the second time on this trip…but this time, we returned the keys!

Picture of us taken by our new friends from Quebec. Note Piper’s face in the window!