Isn't this an incredible picture? Mimi took this in the campground here in Patzcuaro, Michoacán. She thinks it is a Nashville Warbler.

We left Mérida and did some hard driving to arrive here late Friday night. We actually spent that night between here and Morelia at a Pemex and came in to the campground the next day. See a trend here? We get someplace late, decide it is too much hassle to drive into the campground then but really we hate spending money just to stay a few hours.

This is our 3rd trip to Patzcuaro, it's a beautiful town and we really like this campground. It's in the middle of a large block, way off the street and surrounded by pine trees. This area looks a lot like Colorado, blue skies, puffy white clouds, pine trees, dry air with no damn oxygen in it! It's almost 7000' in altitude, brutal! We were actually a lot higher on the way here, one pass over 10k' and around nightfall we were in Toluca a huge city at 8500'. Mimi really loves me because she said she wasn't tired and she would keep going to get us a little lower so I didn't have to spend the night up in Toluca. That morning we had left Orizaba in the state of Veracruz at around 1500', in 2 days we've gone from sea level to here. No slow acclimating.

We both ended up pretty sick from the altitude. This is embarrassing for Mimi the Colorado native. She's just been too long at sea level. We were supposed to meet some friends here but it didn't work out and we spent a couple days with headaches, joint aches, stomach aches. We were so sick we didn't even set up the internet dish for 2 days. I took this picture of our dish with the color changing light we put on it. Cool huh?

We did get into town for dinner and to search for dog food. This dog food search can be amusing. When all this started coming out about the rat poison in dog food in the US we decided to start feeding our dogs the BARF diet. It stands for Bones And Raw Food, you can google it. The important part is that we have to find raw meat and bones for the dogs, it's not as easy as buying a 25lb bag of dog food and not worrying about it for weeks. I thought I had us covered for the trip, I had frozen little packets of chicken and chicken livers for each day. Who would believe that our once homeless street dogs would not like chicken livers? Nope, turned up their noses at them. So, I had to use the next days food and then we ran short. When we got here we were too beat up from the altitude the first day so I made them a yummy dinner of rice, raw egg and yogurt. But by the 2nd day I had to go looking for raw meat.

This is the "real Mexico" and there are no big box stores nearby with nicely packaged meat and chicken. I had to find a carniceria or butcher shop. Once I found it I had to figure out what to order, my spanish is rather weak in beef parts. When I arrived the butcher was busy hacking up half a cow, I pointed to a likely looking chunk and asked for it. It was some joint or another so I asked him to cut it into smaller chunks as the bone was huge. He suggested deboning and cutting it into nice thin fillets but I had him cut it into pretty big chunks right through the bone. I wasn't about to tell the guy that it was for my dogs, I'm pretty sure he would have been insulted. As it was, he looked at me a little weird and probably wondered what kind of odd gringo dish I was going to make. I was back again the next day and picked another likely looking hunk of beef to have cut into large chunks. He remembered me and now I know he was thinking I was pretty weird. I went to a different butcher the next day as I was too embarrassed to return.

The dogs are loving the raw steak though, I don't know how well they are going to like it when we get back to the US where the beef is much more expensive and they are going to get a lot more chicken parts.

This is the campground we're at, our little spot of pastoral beauty outside of town. There is a great mix of people staying here and we've had a lot of fun happy hours and late night chats. That's one of the things I love about RVing, the camaraderie and the chance to meet and talk with so many different people from all over.