On the road again...

Haven't posted anything in a while.  Mostly because this winter has entailed work, work, and work!  There was a brief interlude, a road trip with my mom to Palm Springs in December for a week, but it was pretty tame.  For some reason in the Palm Springs area instead of all the hoity-toity stuff like golf, we seemed to keep finding the Mexican points of interest -- a chain of supermarkets my mom fell in love with called Cárdenas, an open-air night market in Indio that turned out to be 98% Mexican, an impromptu Mexican festival with live music...  Don't worry, we still went to the Shields Date Farm and the amazing Palm Springs Art Museum.  But it got me thinking -- I haven't been to Mexico in over a year.  Perhaps instead of visiting a part of the US that isn't too far from the border and resembles Mexico in parts, I should visit Mexico itself! So -- about 2 weeks ago I snapped up some plane tickets to Mexico City and off I go for my birthday!  My plan is to spend time in two cities -- Querétaro and Guanajuato, which are originally silver mining towns in the heartland known as the Bajío at about 6600 feet altitude and only a few hours away from Mexico City.  They're supposed to be pretty fabulous.  In Querétaro I will be Couchsurfing, and in Guanajuato I'm going to do language school at Escuela Mexicana (http://escuelamexicana.com/) and stay with a family in a homestay.  At some point I may make a quickie trip to San Miguel de Allende which is between the two, otherwise known as gringo heaven.  Mostly I'm going to try to avoid the gringos, though, in order to improve my Spanish skills :)  Should be fun.  I'll try to post my adventures here on the website... so stay tuned.  I leave on Feb 23 :)