Desert nights get cooler than desert days.
In the winter, day temperatures can rise to the eighties, but, at night, they can drop to the forties. Park models have propane or electric heat and RV’s are not immune from Mother Nature’s mood swings. When the sun drops you need a jacket, a flashlight, and a heater.
” Call this number and put it where the delivery truck can see it, ” are my Tuesday morning instructions at the RV park office.
I am given a four by six inch piece of orange card stock with a place to write my name, my space number, and the date of my request.
ARIZONA PROPANE takes up most of the card space with barely room for their phone number and website. I call, give credit card information, get scheduled for delivery on Wednesday between eight and ten.
Wednesday morning at ten forty five, the delivery truck pulls up and its driver runs a hose to my propane tank, fills it, and writes a ticket for the minimum charge of five gallons and a five dollar service fee. The bill is $20.00.
” That will keep you warm, ” the kid says, as he rolls his supply hose back onto a reel on the back of the company truck.
From my space he pulls across the street and services a three hundred thousand dollar recreational vehicle.
Being warm for twenty bucks is a bargain.
Spending three hundred thousand for anything on wheels seems like a walk on the wild side.
In the downtown historical district of Truth or Consequences, hot springs bubble to the surface.
In old days dusty cowboys would hang their chaps on mesquite branches and swap stories with Indians who hung their moccasins on adjacent branches to look like rabbit ears. In newer days, hotels have been built above the springs and guests soak in claw foot tubs to their heart’s content.
The only admonishments to guests at River bend are not to indulge in drugs and/or alcohol, limit the time of your soak, keep hydrated, call for help if needed. River Bend Hot Springs is well maintained and now you hang your chaps on hooks inside private soaking enclosures. For social folks, there is a public soaking pool just outside the office.
Looking out from my Tierra private soak, the Rio Grande meanders, not in any hurry to get to Juarez.
Each time here, there are more amenities.
Jake, as one of his worker’s admits, ” does a damn good job of fixing things and making the place better. ”
When I lived here I visited two times a week. Now, two times a year has to do.
Hot water soaks seems to often straighten out my bumpy thinking.
A good placebo usually beats bitter medicine every day of the week.
Calzada Street begins at the Granada Cathedral and ends at Lake Nicaragua. This street has become a main tourist draw and has everything a tourist might want, and plenty they don’t need.
In the stretch down both sides of Calzada Street you have bars, restaurants, street vendors, an open seating area in the middle of the street, waiters standing on sidewalks promoting mojitos and two for one Happy Hour. This place is a mixed drink of locals, foreigners, tourists, ex-pats, hustlers, transients, businessmen, artists and artisans, homeowners.
In the old days this was a sleepy street and residents lived normal lives. With an influx of foreigners, real estate became more valuable than most could have ever imagined. A quiet street on the way to the Lake became the Las Vegas Strip. Old adobe homes were suddenly valuable.
This house on Calzada Street has brought local issues out into public.
It’s owner calls out swindlers, by name.
The bottom line is that this house is not for sale, unless, of course, the price is right.
Swindlers buy dirt cheap and sell sky high.
Swindlers, and those swindled, dance a fine line on Calzada Street.
When you ask locals where the best places to dine are, in Granada, El Garaje restaurant is one of the first to be mentioned.
The first time I walked past the place, it didn’t register as important.
It was closed then because of an electrical outage but the proprietor came to the door and apologized and shook my hand.
When I returned. he remembered my name.
The restaurant is called ” El Garaje ” because it occupies a spot that someone’s car used to occupy. Many homes in Granada have a garage directly in front of their house, You open the iron gates to your property, drive right into a garage, park, and then walk up garage steps and walk right into your living room. The owners of this restaurant have turned their garage, at the street front, into a restaurant.
This restaurant has limited seating, and, when full, stays full until someone leaves. Paul serves and his wife cooks.
The vegetable barley soup is so good that I go back to the menu for a pulled pork sandwich with caramelized onions and homemade coleslaw without mayo,
I leave without trying the sour orange cheesecake for my pocketbook’s sake.
There is fine dining in Granada.
You just have to find the right garage.
In Granada, streets have horses, wagons, carts and carriages..
Horses and carriages carry tourists on tours of the city and the usual place to match up is in front of the Hotel Alhambra at the Parque Central.
Horses and carts are also working today, hauling sand, lumber, and produce down shaded thoroughfares.
This morning, two Nicaraguan generations, sitting next to one another, turn a corner, the reins waiting to be passed, but not just yet.
There will not be many years before horses will not be allowed on thoroughfares here and one more trace of the nineteenth century will vanish.
This boy won’t have a horse and a cart in his future, but he will remember this early morning ride with his Dad.
There was a time in the 1960’s when urban renewal in the United States was all the craze.
Urban renewal caused structures that had been built hundreds of years ago to be razed, and, in their place, modern buildings went up with modern materials and modern ideas about what people were supposed to live in.
In Granada, in the Historical District, there are strict rules against changing old. Any modifications have to be approved, and the outsides of all buildings must remain intact and true to the century they were built. Many of these buildings have walls of adobe, one of man’s oldest construction materials.
Walking the Historical District, old homes, warehouses and businesses are being gutted, repaired, and brought into our century. Piles of sand and bags of cement are close at hand as day laborers mix and fill wheelbarrows with plaster for men with trowels and hawks. Adobe walls are repaired when they can be.
In this district of Granada, things seem to look as they always have, because the codes say that it will be so.
Old, with our help, doesn’t have to go gently into the good night.
Since Adam was created out of mud, and it was good enough for our Maker, why would we want to tear down mud buildings made out of the same stuff as we are?
Early morning, city crews are closing traffic on Calle Libertidad and an intersecting residential street.
An old fashioned wood electrical pole is going to be replaced by a newer fiberglass model,and new electrical lines are being strung to provide more service to a nearby house under construction, a house directly across the street from us spectators. This old wood pole sticks up through the roof overhang of a home that was here before the road ever thought about coming this way.
The city crew starts around eight and right after lunch power is cut so linemen can scramble up poles and reattach new lines in place of old ones.
The men in hardhats, overseen by their supervisors, do their tasks in an orderly fashion.
Onlookers sit on front stoops and watch the men work, traffic finds other ways to bypass the scene,and pedestrians lift yellow tape and squeeze underneath to get to their casa’s on this little side street off the main thoroughfare downtown.
When power is restored there are sighs of relief and the new pole doesn’t touch the old house though there is still a hole in its roof that someone will have to patch.
Civilization, these days, still goes only as far as roads and electricity.
We are all hooked up to all kinds of grids even if we only see a few of them.
Electric is civilization’s lifeblood.
Unplugging, for some, is a death sentence.
There are exotic birds in the pool area, some in cages, some free in the banana trees. Two of the caged birds are varieties of parrot and several others are parakeets. They are brought out by staff in mid morning and climb obstacles in their cages, hang upside down on swings, break sunflower seeds with stout beaks.
There are also two tortuga’s in the undergrowth by the pool. They are more difficult to find because they are not colorful and make no noise.
After looking, and not finding them, I give up the hunt till Security man Juan finds one and calls me to admire it.
The smaller of the two is underneath plant leaves and nestled in shade, in a moist area.
” No agua, ” Juan says, wagging his finger.
He picks up the tortuga and holds it in the air.
It’s hands, feet, neck and head remain inside its shell. It looks like a rock with a hole in the middle.
Tortuga’s make good pets. They eat leafy plants, don’t tear up flower beds, eat insects, are quiet to a fault, and hibernate if it ever gets cold enough in Granada.
Juan carefully places the turtle on pebbles but it doesn’t change it’s attitude of withdrawal.
I return to the pool and don’t hear a peep out of either of them.
All I hear is the rooster next door that wakes me every morning and struts all day, full of himself.
Tortuga’s don’t talk much, but if they do, I listen.
It is always good to hear about red berries.
Walking in this rain forest we are truly in a different world within our world, surrounded by green, the smell of decomposing plant life, the sounds of unseen animals. The city, though not far away, is actually very far away. As we hike, our voices are captured by the space around us and it feels like we are being held here by unseen forces.
Whether you are on Mombacho in Nicaragua or in rain forests in Costa Rica, the advice is the same.
Don’t eat anything if you don’t know what it is.
Red is nature’s stop sign.
Jose makes sure we know that there are some things you are not wise to do in this preserve, even if temptation is strong.
Being tempted in the garden goes way back in human history.
Abdallah Tours is on Calle Calzada. They offer tours at the same price most other tour companies do but having an English speaking guide is always desirable.
Mario, our guide for the Granada Islands tour, knows his subjects and studies while we sight see.
Enroute, he tells us about an old Spanish Fort that protected Granada from pirates and invaders, protected cargo going back to Spain in the 1500’s when Spain was not part of a European Union and had its own colonization programs in the New World.
This fort is a relic in a new world knotted together like a family of bickering kids.
It has value as an example of old history abandoned by the side of the road as new history marches past.
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