Playing tourist again

Saturday July 31st…Our 28th anniversary! And onwards to Guanajuato.
We thought we were on our way to Oz, but...holy cow, we are not in Kansas anymore. Beautiful scenery and wait, there is a horse out there, no, it is a man plowing between the rows of corn using the old plow and horse method. We are stopped on the highway, mind you, under a no bicycles sign, and along comes a rickshaw type bicycle passing all the traffic, no problem. Soon the reason for the stoppage comes into view.. One mangled station wagon, two mangled bikes and hundreds of bottles of Coke spewed all over the highway….a coke deal gone bad…kind of like Mr. Hawver’s watermelon fiasco. As we pass the man on the bicycle started picking up some of the bottles and put them in his basket. As if this wasn’t enough laughs on a highway, traffic suddenly swerves left revealing an ambulance. It was not just an ambulance driving down the road, it was following a bike race!!! In the right lane of the highway!! Probably the cause of the great Coke bust!
From a bit of research, we knew the streets of Guanjuato were quite curvey and maps never contained all of them. As we were driving down into the town, there were people along side of the road waving and yelling at us. We waved. Then we noticed one of the men was holding a map…Good idea, let’s pick one up…we struck gold! Turns out the guys handing out the maps will get in your car and direct you into town and parking. You could also keep them with you to be a tour guide. Well we screwed up. After he got us to town, we said Thank you and went on our merry way. First, the market..Oh my Gosh Busy, packed, labyrinth, Carnitas totas! And a great leather purse. Onto find the temple that our guide had said would be great to see and so a candy store with 300 kinds! Up the hill we hike. Our map said it would be about a 15 min. walk. After an hour, straight uphill, we asked directions. We were right on track but 1 ½ kilometers away. Up we went. About a half hour later we asked again….3 kilometers more….Finito Bandito, we flagged a bus and went back down into town. So, besides just leaving streets off, maps of Guanajuato are not to scale, at ALL! On our bus ride we cud have walked faster, why… because we were following a semi pulling an over width bulldozer through the narrow winding hilly streets of the town. We made it to where we could easily walk and got of that heated tin can!!
We found a ‘fanicular’, an incline rail car. We boarded and went up to the most gorgeous view of the city/. Somehow we lucked out and got front and center for the view out the window. Too cool. After we were down we decide it was past lunchtime and found a great lunch spot in the shade. We were obviously tourist of the US persuasion and every vendor person stopped by our table to try to sell us things. We even got serenaded by a picture perfect Mexican singer!! It was a great break. We found callenda baso, the kissing street. It is street or alley way that is no more than 24” wide. Legend has it that two lovers who lived in different houses, one on one side of the alley and one on the other, could kiss good night over the balconies. If you go there and kiss it will being you 7 years good luck. If you go and don’t kiss, 7 years bad luck. So we kissed in the alley on our 28th Anniversary!!n We did a bit of shopping and jewelry looking and decide we had best get out of Dodge before dark as we no longer had a driving guide. Tadah!! We were great. Heather sat in the back seat with 4 different maps and I had one in the front. We managed to navigate out of twon without getting lost and then back to the highway! All in all, forgoing to a lace we had never been before, we did superbly!