The streets of Patzcuaro

Well yesterday I had to go downtown to pick up my wife who was having her hair done.
When I dropped her off  in the morning the traffic was bearable, by bearable I mean that sitting in the car stopped or crawling about a block every minute was reasonable considering the influx of visitors from around the country and the world.

We figured we would dash into town earlier, have breakfast, I would drop her off and later pick her up.

That was the plan.

I knew by the blocks of combi buses stacked for blocks that I wouldn't use the normal road into to town to pick her up.

There is a back road which saves at least 5 minutes off the destination which we use now and then depending on where we need to go in the Centro. The problem with this short cut is there are very narrow parts of it where only one car can pass and sometimes it gets blocked up.

I grabbed that road and all was running smooth up until about 3 blocks from the Centro where all the action is, there was a car parked in the street, unloading it's luggage at a small hotel.
That back road is a very narrow road. By narrow I mean that there are about 3 or 4 places as you approach the Centro where there is room for only one car to pass.

The rest of the year when approaching another car, you figure one or the other will pull into the side walk parking area while you pass or you pull in and let the car going up pass.
That system seems to work very well and has always worked in the past.
Not today.

What happened is at this very narrow section, this interloper of a car with  several people with bags and rolling luggage and a carry all lashed to the top of their car, decided to stop. ( I could tell by the plates)


So..... I am in my Tracker going down, following a little Tsuru sedan, behind me was another car. We all got to the place where the street narrows and cannot go any further since these people are deciding to unload their cargo.

I look in my rear view mirror and two more cars behind the one that was there attach themselves to our line. On the other side of the unloading interlopers, a pickup truck comes behind.

After about 30 seconds another car follows the pickup.

It was then that I look back and see that there are at least 6 or 7 cars behind me, and now 4 or 5 cars behind the unloading visitors.
How is this going to play out?

It was going to be difficult to have 6 cars including me back up about a block up the hill to let these people go. There was no way that the cars behind the visitors were going to be able to back up either.
Luckily, the driver was able to drive up on the sidewalk which has about an 8 inch curb and position his car so that we could pass him. The cars behind him were able to one by one, pull into a drive way as each car passed the other.

So, after 15 minutes the situation resolved itself, but it sure would have been nice if the people had planned for some other way to resolve the issue, like maybe pulling up into a drive way a half a block up to were they wouldn't be blocking the narrow street.

These next few days are days where I stay home, toss more logs on the fireplace, get to read, eat up all the leftovers and wait it out. The down town is a nightmare, tonight there will be thousands of  people,  traffic will be at a standstill,
 I know, we took some friends down on this night about 15 years ago, and that was enough for me.

It is nice to go to the outskirts of town to visit and see some of the cemeteries and decoration after the madness dies down.

Today and tomorrow will be tourist central, hopefully it will not rain, and hopefully all the visitors will not trample all the decorated grave sites around the area.
The merchants and inn keepers are expecting a large crowd this year, so hopefully we can get some badly needed pesos into the local coffers.

One of the parades yesterday was the children's parade, where they all followed a pickup truck with humongous speakers playing Michael Jackson's Thriller........

Scary, Scary.........