The Cactus Trip Diaries

When planning one of our trips it is important to plan for the unexpected – the flight home waits for no-one.

In March 2014 we had scheduled our reserve day for an extra night at Vizarron. The hotel facilities suited us and their were interesting plants to see or re-visit a month after we had seen them on arrival.

Walking around the town of San Miguel de Allende we agreed that this was a much nicer place to spend our last night in Mexico. There were no interesting cacti reported from the area, sometimes due to the fact that there are none to be found, sometimes due to the lack of exploration by people travelling to or from Mexico International Airport, some 250 km away.

Today we enjoyed more of a sight seeing holiday, with Alain and I enjoying gentle strolls through the town with regular ‘pit-stops’ at charming little cafe / restaurants, photographing streets and churches in the busy streets – it was surprising how many American and European languages we could hear around us and how many people working in the shops and eateries helpfully switched to good English when we tried out our improving Spenglish.

Souvenirs were added to our luggage – I had spare weight allowance and bought yet another brightly coloured blanket that would add colour to some of the surfaces in my conservatory once the plants return to their outside spots when Spring returns next year.

The huge Parroquia San Miguel Arcangel church dominates the Jardin Allende, a Plaza planted up with clipped ficus trees that provide shade for the people engaged in watching other people, moving on to the cafe restaurants around the square for refreshments or a main meal. And so our sightseeing became a bit of a pub crawl, with visits back to the near by hotel to check on a recovering Bart and to drop off our souvenir purchases.

That night there was a parade on the Plaza with two or three giant puppets were followed around the centro of town, followed by a fully dressed up Mariachi band.

Once the band returned to the square, they serenaded a couple with a small baby on the terrace of the restaurant where we had just finished dinner, providing the perfect opportunity to film their performance of two songs as a perfect ending to another trip.