Recently I was in Mexico to thaw out from the brutal unending Minnesota winter. We, my saintly wife and I, were staring at the blue Pacific rolling and crashing on the perfect seven mile beach near Barro de Posta, Mexico, a town of 300 beautiful, gentle natives. It’s easy to lose time when the postcard is real and moving. We saw a couple dozen people/day on the beach, because there are no hotels, only private homes, some large, but mostly small with land grants that date back to the Spaniards. We rented a house on the beach for less than most hotel rooms, north 25 miles in the resort area known as Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo. The quiet is enhanced by having no TV, no phone, and no internet or another words, off the grid. The local restaurants on the beach don’t take credit cards or American dollars, only Pesos. There are no banks for 25 miles and most of the natives don’t have cars. Barro de Posta is a small fishing village that was there when Magellan and Captain Cook sailed by. More than likely, they anchored in the bay and took on fresh water and supplies. We were staring out at sea when a number of people came by on horses with beers in hand. I asked a couple of neighbors, Walter from Calgary and Clarence from Oregon about this and they said they would like to ride down by horse, to the village the next day. I said, “let’s do it”. The next day at noon, the neighbors and I walked to the corral back of the house, back in the trees and each selected a grand stead to ride on. Dressed in cowboy fashion, shorts, t-shirt, and flip flops, we mounted the horses and clip clopped down the beach to the little town. There were ten little restaurants on the beach, all with plastic chairs and tables advertising various Mexican beers and covered by palapas, (palm fronds over a wooden frame). You can sit, feet in the sand, looking at the ocean a couple hundred feet from your chair. Securing our stallions to a tree in the shade, we ordered beers delivered to the table ice cold with a strip of lime protruding from the neck of the bottle. The beers cost 13 pesos each, delivered to the table, about $1.00. After a few of these and the arrival of a couple of musical entertainers, we had to try some tequila. That went so well, we stayed and stayed, longer than planned. Pretty soon we were dancing with the locals and getting louder and smarter. Isn’t that how it goes? After getting as smart as we could stand it, we figured we should ride home, before we couldn’t. The wonderful locals helped us cowboys on our horses and yelling, Olay, we decided to ride through town. The streets are all sand and so we were off through the town clip clopping along. We were having a difficult time staying on our horses. Walter finally slid off his horse to the street. We stopped to help. Walter was on his back on the street. Soon we were all sitting in the sand in the street laughing and hooting Olay. Luck would have it, we had fallen off our horses in front of the police station. A police man was yelling at us and none of us could speak Spanish. Soon we had people helping us into the police station, a small concrete block building of 20’ x 20’. We sat on a bench mumbling, “what is going to happen next?” The police man sent for his son who translated that we had broken the law by driving drunk. “But we are on horses,” I protested. The law had been broken and we were to be fined or jailed. After a bit of mumbling and translating we agreed to each pay a fine of 100 pesos ($8.00). We paid the fine and they helped us on our horses and pointed us in the right direction. By now we were getting thirsty, so we rode to the beach, ordered beers to go, while still mounted, and rode the horses on the beautiful beach next to the Pacific, back to the house, realizing that we had just gotten DUI’s by horse. Olay. Published every Wednesday, at least.
