Latitude 38 magazine's guide to cruising in Mexico recommends that one take a vacation from cruising from time to time. "A vacation from cruising?!" you say, incredulously? "Aren't you already on vacation?"

Well, no, actually. Living aboard a boat is not as easy as it looks. Some of you who attended our Bon Voyage party will have reconsidered our sanity, planning to spend so much time in such a small space. The space isn't the issue; the problems are wilder and more concrete than one generally encounters in the city. Here's one problem that I think about a lot: We are totally at the mercy of the weather. That's why so many cruisers while away their time in places like Mexico, where the temperatures are generally in the 70s and 80s and the breezes are mild. But the weather still matters. At anchor, when the wind picks up in the afternoons, the water gets choppy and the rigging groans and the anchor chain grumbles and the bow jumps up and down over the waves. At sea, the waves get taller and steeper and start blowing spray, and you can't make sandwiches because the peanut butter jar keeps tipping over and the bread keeps flying away to the other side of the boat. So being at the mercy of the weather is a big stressor.

Another stressor--one harder to get used to, I believe, is a certain ennui that befalls the hapless sailor who has nothing much to do except maintain the boat or go eat tacos or read another Pat Conroy novel (we have none aboard, so this particular problem remains distant, but you get the point). We don't miss the regular crushing routine of getting up too early to take another shower before dashing for the bus to a job whose tasks are unchanged from the day before. But in exchange we don't have anyone else to be accountable to; nobody needs us. So what time we get up in the morning is up to us. What, when, and where we eat is entirely up to us. Nobody else benefits from what we're doing, which is why cruisers help one another so much: "Oh, I used to have a bilge pump that leaked like that. Have you tried reseating the lower gasket lip? That might work, and if it doesn't maybe I can come over and have a look at it" is the sort of conversation that keeps us going.

But this is scarcely enough. When the bilge pump's lower gasket lip blows for the third time, and the hapless sailor has to dry out the soggy spare halyards again, somehow his spirit is tested. Clearly the pump won't accept the blame, even though it wasn't designed very well. Here the sailor is, stuck in paradise, unwilling to go sailing without a working bilge pump, spending another day upside down in the lazarette, glasses falling off and sweat dripping off his nose, and if all goes well at the end of the day the bilge pump will not leak so badly and he can go eat tacos with some other cruisers who spent their days doing the same thing. This is not an entirely vacation-y lifestyle.

So we took a vacation. We left the boat in the marina at La Cruz and went to Guadalajara, capital of the rich state of Jalisco, compared by some to San Francisco despite its distance from the sea. Armed with our guidebook and the recommendations of friends who'd delivered their baby there, off we went. Five hours by bus, up over the dry mountains to the northeast, past choppy runnels of volcanic scree and along the walls of steep canyons with tiny plots of green farmland, through rows upon rows of dusty grey-green agave clinging to narrow bands of sandy yellow soil: Jalisco is the heartland of tequila.

It so happened that we arrived in Guadalajara during a tequila festival. I do not believe that tequila festivals are traditional in Mexico--all Mexican festivals are fuelled in part by tequila. But it so happens that there is these days something of a glut of tequila, and consolidation of the corporations that own the distilleries that make it, and overplanting, and so it is important to raise the profile of tequila a bit.

Guadalajara's historic downtown is beautiful, and an excellent place to celebrate tequila. The main cathedral, the government buildings, the three- and four-story buildings of the 19th-century burghers, are connected together with plazas and walkways big and small. So Guadalajara's downtown is a great place to walk and to hold festivals. In the biggest plaza the festival's organizers had placed a great big stage, the kind for rock concerts, with huge video screens and "VIVA EL TEQUILA" banners flying all around. And, our arrival being on a Friday night, and Mexicans being devoted as they are to strolling in the evenings (a very civilized activity that is sorely missing from life in the States), thousands upon thousands of people, many of them teenagers wearing slightly embarrassing punk outfits, streamed from the subways and the buses and everywhere to see the band and see one another and eat ice cream and corn on the cob, and buy blinking plastic helicopters and fly them into the crowd, and dance close to the sound of noisy mariachi bands. A few of them even visited the dozens of tequila festival booths to sample their wares. We spent hours drifting through the crowds, gaping at all the people and excitement. Strangely, no one--and I mean no one--was drunk.

In the morning we emerged from our $25US-a-night garret at the Hotel Posada San Rafael, a bit mosquito-bitten but unscathed (the screens on the window were poorly stapled at the edges), and staggered up to Cafe Madoka. Cafe Madoka is one of several classic coffee houses in downtown Guadalajara of a style one might recognize from a 1950s movie: Large, with creamy yellow paint on the walls, red vinyl booths and hard chairs around square tables. In the back, an area where men (only men) above a certain age, with thick glasses, sideburns or leather vests play dominoes, clacking them on the table and sucking their teeth. The food isn't great--pancakes, or "huevos divorciados" or chilaquiles fill the menu--but the coffee is good and the service plentiful and efficient. And the enormous espresso machine bespeaks that beautiful era when chrome Chryslers crept the streets and progress seemed inevitable. We were enchanted, and one day I hope to get good enough at dominoes to join those men in the back.

Much of Guadalajara's downtown, it seems, was planted in the 1950s. Long, sleek storefronts in obsolete colors of turquoise and pink; shoe stores that look like movie theater lobbies, with thousands of shoes carefully displayed in closely spaced, floor-to-ceiling lanes of glass, with code numbers on molded signs next to each: Walk to the Kodacolor-carpeted palace in the back, and ask the sullen teenager to demonstrate a pair of E1097s, size 8.

But this modern extravagance is underlaid by a more enduring Mexican past. The main cathedral was consecrated in 1618, while its distinctive conical towers were installed in 1848. At the far end of the chain of plazas, though, past the Plaza de la Liberacion and the Plaza de los Mariachis, after the Rotonda de los Jaliscenses Ilustres, beyond the Teatro Degollado with its frieze of Apollo and the Nine Muses, beyond even the last vinyl tents of the tequila festival is Mexican history at its best: The Instituto Cultural de Cabanas. This enormous 1810 hospice was built as an orphanage and home for invalids, and for over 150 years served more than 450 children at a time in its 23 courtyards. One doesn't visit this place for the courtyards or the echoes of orphans; one comes to see the murals painted by Jose Clemente Orozco, one of the great Mexican muralists, in the central chapel. In 1938 and 1939 Orozco painted on the walls and ceiling, in the spaces between the arches, what is regarded as his finest work. The central image, in the dome, is an image of "The Man of Fire", viewed from below, swathed in flame: God? The devil? Man arising to heaven, or descending angrily into Hell? Every scene is potent: A machine horse trampling skulls; a factory pulley backlit with flaming light, above a dark stratigraphy of Precolumbian masks; robot Conquistadors spearing natives; abstract colonial streetscapes with flames like cloaked figures flitting among the rooftops; politicians proclaiming progress from their pedestals. The caretakers of this place have thoughtfully provided benches to lie down on so one can take it all in. Be sure to see the photo gallery to get a taste.

The streets of downtown Guadalajara felt to us more like a modern European city than any we'd yet visited in Mexico--and we've visited more than a few. The avenues are broad, the pace quick, the fashions forward. By contrast, their public works appears to be as retrograde as one could despairingly imagine. It seems that throughout the downtown they have decided to modernize the underground water lines and electric lines, ALL AT ONCE. Block after block, street after street, the sidewalks are in ruins, the pavement riddled with deep holes, orange plastic pipes sticking out of the ground. Dust swirls through the air from great piles of debris. People pick their way along the main streets gingerly, tiptoeing over deathtrap plywood sheets spanning ragged pits. People watching from windows shout out to passers-by, "Hey! It's easier if you go up one block to the left--the street there is still paved!" There is no parking, no access. Shopkeepers look up hopefully from mopping their floors in case a brave pedestrian should leap a gap and try to get in. Our shoes were filthy; we sneezed constantly.

Saturday night we ate very late in a romantic restaurant in the courtyard of an 18th-century house. We ate salads and appetizers while lights winked at us from metal stars hanging overhead. Folk paintings decorated the walls and a guitarist strolled. When we went back the following evening the place had been transformed and we couldn't get in: Film festival people had taken over. Without black t-shirts and badges we felt a little out of place, and there was nowhere to sit.

Our Sunday morning walk to Cafe Madoka was momentarily halted by the closure of a main arterial street--similar perhaps to Geary Street in San Francisco in scale and scope. Avenida Juarez was interrupted because it was a Sunday, and therefore Bicycle Day! In a remarkable instance of fitness promotion and civic spirit, once a week Guadalajara closes at least a few miles of this street to all but bicyclists. And bicyclists there were, by the tens of thousands. Bent old men on racing bikes with numbered jerseys; fathers on Mercurios towing tykes on their own miniature machines, with strings for towropes. Rental bikes with ads on the spokes and between the gaps in the frames. Moms on borrowed low-rider bikes, looking pleased. Bikes with three grown boys astride them, tires flat with the strain. Where they all came from I don't know, but I've never seen so many bikes in one place. It made Critical Mass in San Francisco look like a bunch of mean-spirited amateurs.

We ambled along--avoiding the gaping six-foot-deep holes in the dusty foundations of a once and future sidewalk--for quite a while until we came to the hula-hoop area at the corner of a park. There were free hula-hoops! Now, they weren't brand-name hula hoops: merely orange plastic conduit taped into a heavy circle, but people were excited to try them. There was a teenager who obviously aspired to a mad streetstyle hula-hoop craze. Next to him swirled a Richard Simmons lookalike, complete with headband. Nearby a woman heaved her hoop around and around until it fell to her feet, over and over again. On the perimeter an ice-cream vendor waited to restore any calories that might have been shed in the effort.

Speaking of hoops, it appears that the wedding industry is alive and well in Guadalajara. There are a couple of major city blocks seemingly dedicated to supplying wedding dresses of the latest fashion. Dozens of stores dedicated to the bride, or the up-and-coming 15-year-old, or the entourage, all displayed their confectionary wares. We poked into one of them and it was like landing in pre-revolutionary France, all tulle and beadwork and bustle, the bodices tapered and skirts spread wide and round. Guadalajaran brides are lucky and their families must be riddled with debt.

Sunday evening we spent in the plazas again. We attended the performance by the "Band of Music of the Government of the State" in a bandstand. Their repertoire tended toward the patriotic--Mexican tunes and Sousa--and strangely, there were so many musicians packed onto the bandstand that we could really only see the backs of their guayaberas and the tops of the brass. And although their volume was fine, they had to compete with a megawatt mariachi band on the VIVA EL TEQUILA stage in the adjoining plaza. Despite all this hundreds of people stood and sat on the ground to hear them play. Being civil servants they could not be asked for an encore, and they packed up their instruments as soon as they were done.

Monday morning we made our way back to La Cruz. The sky was overcast and the wind was blowing, but the boat was still there, and our cruising friends had missed us and wanted to know all about it, so in the evening, over tacos, we regaled them with tales of our vacation adventures and exchanged thoughts about our bilge pumps.