It's the Fifth of July!

Yes, it's the day after Independence Day here in Mexico.  Okay, it's not really July 5th, and Independence Day is September 16th, not July 4th.  It is a great holiday, which is celebrated beginning the night before with the reading of El Grito - the call to independence from the Spanish, proclaimed in the nearby town of Dolores Hidalgo by Father Miguel Hidalgo.  And it wasn't Dolores Hidalgo then - just plain Dolores.  As San Miguel de Allende was just San Miguel el Grande.  The first town to which the peasant army marched was San Miguel, where the Allende family lived and young Sr. Allende was in the thick of the revolutionary planning.  So it's a big ole holiday here in San Miguel.  And you can probably see a pattern emerging here:  Dolores = Dolores Hidalgo; San Miguel = San Miguel de Allende, eh?  Where it all began!  (I'm not kidding, you can look it up!)

Although the party began on Thursday, September 15th and continued on into the 16th, we missed it entirely last year.  We were on our way to Barcelona, Spain - where they don't celebrate Mexico's revolution for some reason.  Can you guess why?  Anyway, we then sailed westbound across the Atlantic, meandered through the eastern Caribbean islands, spent some time in WDW, and eventually made our way back home to Mexico.  It was all over by then.

This was our chance to participate in the festivities first hand.  After walking past the stands selling patriotic gear (flags of various sizes, car pennants, bric-a-brac, and those Vuvuzela horns that were so effective at the World Cup last year) for the last couple of weeks, we tried to stay up until midnight on Thursday to watch the fireworks from our rooftop patio.  Failed; fell asleep before they started.

On Friday, we walked into Centro and tried to reach the Jardin at the center of town.  Got about a block from it when the crowds became unmanageable and we abandoned the Jardin for lunch at Hecho en Mexico. And in a shocking display of the lack of patriotism for our host country, we ordered bacon-guacamole burgers!  [They were great, by the way!]

We were thinking of walking part way into town to watch the parade later in the day as it reached out into the non-Centro area, but there was a terrific thunder storm that shook the town about the time the parade was to start.  We don't do crowds and we don't do electrical storms (don't get us wrong, we love them when viewed from inside).  So we missed the parade which started after the storm abated.  We also missed watching the bullfights - well, not so much.

When we walked into town this morning, things were pretty much back to normal.  The crowds were still with us, though not so very many.  Actually the Jardin looked quite normal for a Saturday morning.  But Starbucks was jammed!  There was no place to sit, so we walked over to those lovely looking, iron benches in the Jardin that are not so lovely when sitting before we made our way home; four miles according to the trusty pedometer.

Now to pack a few last things and head off to the Mexico City airport really, really early Monday morning for this year's trip down the coast of the western United States, the Mexican Riviera, and a few days at Disneyland - where it all began!