From Antigua we flew back to Mexico City. We had eight hours of freedom between the touchdown and the 15-hour bus ride back to Mazatlan. It made sense to store our luggage, including the umbrella, at the bus terminal and take the Metro downtown. It felt nice and homey to be back in Mexico. As we emerged from the subway station at Bellas Artes, the rain started pouring. We were caught under a drinks-stand awning at an open market and watched people and goods getting soaked. We revisited a few favorite spots, in particular the cathedral and Pasteleria Ideal, the largest cake and pastry store we know of. There are 50 kilogram cakes for sale there.

Three bad movies and eight pieces of pastry later the bus delivered us back to Mazatlan, and the boat. To our delight, the dock lines had not chafed through, nor did any of the thru-hulls fail. The birds unfortunately mistook the boat for a toilet, but we easily restored her to her previous beauty.

The El Cid Marina in Mazatlan is nice, very nice. It has two swimming pools, an enormous jacuzzi, a palm grove and manicured lawns, showers, laundry. There is Bingo every afternoon, aquatic volleyball, and happy hour every hour for "national drinks" from 2 to 8 pm, all to a daily-repeated soundtrack of oldies from speakers hung in the trees. They show two movies a week, projected on a screen hung between two of the palm trees. Lying in our outdoor lounge chairs we feel like a pair of retirees.

And it's really hot here. We sleep entirely without covers, and we stop sweating only when we are inside Home Depot (we make a trip there for one screw at a time). We'd like to move on, but the weather is pulling our leg and does not let the wind turn around. According to our sources, it's been blowing steadily and soundly from the northwest, the exact direction where we want to go. Forty hours of beating into it does not seem like fun, so we wait. Meanwhile, Eric is doing work on the deck (removing teak plugs and rusted screws and replacing them with new ones), and I kill the occasional roaches. It has taken nine months, but we finally got roaches on the boat. The marina is full of them, so they just climb the dock lines and get in.