It’s been a long birthday celebration, but I hope you have enjoyed the mini tour of some of our favorite places in Mexico. There was one more area we had to visit on our way home, so bear with us. Our first stop was Pátzcuaro in the State of Michoacán on the lake of the same name.

Tearing ourselves away from our beautiful guest stay in Ajijic, we headed southwest into the “dangerous” state of Michoacán, once famous for its “Sinsemilla” marijuana. Today, it is known for Lake Pátzcuaro, the Tarascan Indians, and the stopover for as many as 60 million

Chapala. In its heyday Chapala was a place where the rich and famous came to vacation. The waterfront is lined with mansions. The lake is certainly not the most beautiful in Mexico but Chapala has the charms of a small Mexican town, and for me, it holds some of the most memorable times of my life.

We could have stayed in Guadalajara for a week, but other adventures called. Tequila!!! It had been years since Monika and I had been to the town of Tequila, a short drive northwest of Guadalajara.

Tequila is a regional specific name for a distilled beverage made from the blue agave plant, primarily in the area near the city of Tequila.

Now we’re getting to the real birthday celebration and some of you may be thinking, “You must be crazy going to Mexico, yes?” Despite all the horrible warnings from the State Department about where not to travel in Mexico, if you had to go, the worst places were probably the States of Jalisco and Michoacán.

So now you’re looking at news with a slight time delay. Following our visit in San Diego and with our truck and car safely stored at our friends’ home, the next day we found ourselves sitting in the waiting room at the Los Angeles airport. What a zoo, except no monkeys and elephants. We ended up in a section that was being rebuilt. It looked like something in a third-world country.

Okay so we’re a few months behind, but really, news is only relevant to whether you’ve heard it or seen it previously, so before we return to Greece and onward to our 40,000 mile expedition across Asia, following the Silk Road, we have to tell you a little bit about my birthday. It was the big 7-0, so I was told I could do anything I wanted that was legal. Humm—

It was 4:00 in the morning. An angry wind buffeted the side of our truck. I peeked out the window and it was snowing. What the ???!!? Glancing at the outside temperature gauge, it was a bitter 33°F. Inside it was a toasty 65°F as our Espar Airtronic purred away in its “maintenance mode”. I could only feel sorry for the hundreds of people surrounding us sleeping in ground tents, rooftop tents and pop-up campers. This was late Spring and it wasn’t supposed to snow or even rain.

  Strike of The Turtle Expedition! By Granville King As noted in many magazine articles, The Turtle Expedition seems to travel much of the known earth – Baja, Brazil, Oregon, and all in between. Still, it was a shock to see’em amble proudly down our mile-long drive-way in their magnificent new Ford F-350 towing a […]

We are in Japan now and our trusty Turtle V expedition truck is on its way to California from South Korea. We will be celebrating another unique Christmas in historic Kyoto and later, since our flight to Sacramento leaves Tokyo on December 31, crossing the dateline and arriving on the 31st, we will enjoy the […]