Wednesday--Back to Oaxaca

We left the graveyard after dawn.  Eric suggested "a stroll down to the river before breakfast."  Why the quotes?  Because the "stroll down" had to start with a "hike up" the mountain before you could get to the goat paths that would go down.  After quite a bit of "up" half of our merry team decided to just sit and enjoy the view while the other half went on in search of "down."  I was in the second half; unfortunately I left the camera with the first half.  But we made it down to the river--fairly shallow, not too fast; could be waded if we felt like it (we didn't).  Shore covered in rocks--maybe not a source of fascination to all, but remember I'm in Florida and we just don't have many rocks lying around (when we built a rock garden, we had to buy rocks, fer cryin' out loud).

Finally Glenn, Jenny and I decided that it was time to kidnap Eric and make him show us a goat path back up (there's an awful lot of "up" around here).  We'd all been up since 4:00 a.m. and breakfast was starting to seem like a really good idea.

And then, alas, it was time to head back to the van for the long twisty drive back to Oaxaca.  I would have liked to have stayed another day in Quiotepec; in all our wanderings we hadn't gone into the church (with the thick walls and the purple neon cross on top) and I would have liked to try baking bread with Isabel.  But you can't do everything.

We stopped at a town partway back for lunch--at least we tried for lunch.  A wall had been painted with a sign for a big Day of the Dead party, and apparently most of the restaurant staff had attended--Eric was told that everyone was too hung over to prepare lunch.  So we just hung on until we got back to Oaxaca and a restaurant where the staff hadn't partied too much.

It was our last meal together--it was time to return to our separate ways, but we'll always have been, for a short time, a small family in Quiotepec. (Eric, aka Fearless Leader, is the one in the hat)