The Cactus Trip Diaries

We had plenty of time to complete our final packing, stroll around the streets some more and buy more small souvenirs to fill up the holes in my luggage. Bart felt fully recovered and, having done such a magnificent job getting us out of Mexico City on arrival, volunteered for the job as driver for the final journey to the Airport.

Soon out of San Miguel de Allende we began to see first small- then larger groups of ‘Mexican Cowboys’ – I must find out what the term for people on horseback, probably involved in the cattle trade, is in Mexico. Gaucho’s? Anyway, there were hundreds, no thousands of them. Many of them were in festive dress, wearing very colourful clothes and their horses too were dressed for a fiesta! What was going on?

Back in the UK, Alain had found an internet article about the ‘Cabalgata of Christ the King’, a tradition since 1927 when the Cristeros war started. The images on the ionternet certainly look identical of what we saw for many miles alongside the road. But the Cabalgata procession is said to take place 2 days before Epiphany so some 2 months after we saw our procession. Was it a rehearsal? Who knows.

I had a shock being unable to find the images and movies that I had taken of the event, until Alain reminded me that as I had already packed my camera for the flight home, I used his camera to record the proceedings from the prime position of the front passenger seat.

Driving back seemed a lot easier than the drive out of Mexico City as the road to the Airport was clearly marked and understood (Aeroporto T1) with a route that SatNav mostly agreed with. Common sense dictated that we’d follow SatNav where there were no signs but followed the signs, assumed to be more up to date than SatNav.

We left San Miguel de Allende at noon and aimed to arrive at 16:00 for flights leaving around 23:00 hrs. We actually arrived at 16:30, due to slow traffic once we hit the Mexico DF border. The car was welcomed back by Hertz, it had served us very well indeed!

We said our goodbyes, as Alain and Bart were due to leave from T1, where the Hertz return garage was based, while I hopped on the Airport train that took me back to T2, where we had originally arrived. I managed to drop off my hold luggage and then found a seat where I could clearly see the Departures board and opened up my laptop to start writing up the Holiday notes.

The noticeboard suggested a departure time of 23:00, 40 minutes earlier than shown on my flight documents. My laptop ran out of power and I tried a local charging point that turned out to be disconnected. Then the notice board announced my departure gate, of course at the other end of the airport, so I quickly packed everything into my rucksack and legged it to Gate 68. nce I arrived back home I realised that  my laptop charger was still at Mexico Airport and that a Microsoft replacement charger costs an eye-watering £65. Why so much?

Never mind. We had a great trip and I plan to do it all again in 2015!