Travel Stories

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Casa Estrella: Our Hillside Home in Guanajuato

It’s a shame we ever stayed at Casa Estrella: We will never be happy anywhere else again.

Thanks, Donna

My friend Donna Bryson recommended we spend time in the World Heritage city of Guanajuato, where she and her family enjoyed a vacation a couple years ago. Since Donna was my favorite partner in exploration when were young, single and living in NYC, I trusted her advice and we decided to visit for five weeks or so on our way north from Tlaquepaque.
 
Lodging proved to be a little bit of a challenge, though.
Guanajuato is a colorful, astonishingly well-preserved city of 150,000 with narrow cobblestone alleys and winding underground tunnels carved out of rock, neither of which was very welcoming to our wide black Tacoma Toyota truck. Hotels and apartments in El Centro (the historic center) don’t have convenient parking, if any at all, and guests have to navigate narrow, steep  pedestrian walkways to get to their entrances – hardly practical when you have as many possessions as us, in addition to
three cats and two bikes.
 
So we widened the search beyond Guanajuato City, and ended up at Casa Estrella Vacation Rental Homes in Valenciana, a village about two kilometers up the mountain from Guanajuato. And although it would have been nice to be able to step out of our lodging right onto one of Guanajuato’s nine plazas and walk a block or two to a restaurant, Casa Estrella offered unique benefits that made it the perfect choice for us.
 

Car- Friendly

 Casa Estrella was one of the only places to stay in Guanajuato that offered secure parking for the truck, though because of the hillside location, getting the vehicle out the couple of times we used it was a spine-tingling tight, logistical challenge. So once we parked the Tacoma, we left it to collect dust, and used buses, cabs or Uber to get around. Buses only cost 7 pesos (37 cents) a ride, and Uber or a cab cost 60-70 pesos ($3.65-$4.20) per ride. 
 
Once we got down into Guanajuato, we used our feet for transportation.

Pet-Friendly

The staff at Casa Estrella happily welcomed our three cats and considered them part of our family. And the cats loved our two-bedroom apartment, Casa Estrellita, from the moment we opened their traveling cages and released them from their travel confinement. Ellie swiftly took over a round blue chair in the living room, though all three cats alternated through at one time or another. Kaylee liked to hang out high up on the second-floor landing, regally surveying her domain. Noxy ambled from bed to bed, and eventually befriended a corner chair in the dining room. He managed to escape one day when the cleaning crew came, and relished the opportunity to amble around the little courtyard below our apartment before coming back to our door and waiting for someone to notice he had been gone.
 
Kaylee
Equinox and the Monk statue
Smoitie in the kitchen

One day, Casa Estrella’s resident cat Toby, who was the spitting image of our old cat Jiji  who died in 2012) except for a scarred right eye, came to the door and meowed loudly, as though asking our cats to come out and play. Lex and I did just that, hanging out on the stairs petting Toby for a long time. Toby belonged to Inge, a Dutch retiree who  dispensed wellness advice, astrology readings, and essential oils from her little apartment across from the fountain below us. The cats never met him.

People- Friendly

 We knew Casa Estrella was going to be people-friendly from the moment we parked our car. First, the manager, Javier Salazar, greeted us warmly. Then three male staffers swooped upon the truck and rapidly carried all of our heavy suitcases, duffle bags, musical instruments, and other assorted paraphernalia up the stairs to our apartment before we even had a moment to breathe. What service! By the time we could blink our eyes, our stuff was in our rooms and we were ready to settle in. 

Casa Estrellita

Our two-bedroom apartment, Casa Estrellita, was absolutely stunning. With a warm pallet of many-shaded oranges and royal blue, with bright pink accents, its warm glow enveloped us. The dining room had a bar with a wine rack in one corner, and a domed brick ceiling with a chandelier hanging over the handmade round wooden table. A newly-constructed breakfast patio overlooked the city of Guanajuato below and awe-inspiring mountains beyond (and Javier brought a lounge chair when he saw how much I enjoyed spending time there reading).  
 
My favorite breakfast spot

The kitchen was large and well stocked. The dinnerware consisted of individually crafted, hand-painted ceramic plates, bowls and mugs from the local Gorky Gonzalez Pottery Studio. The rest of the house was also filled with decorative pottery – on shelves, walls, the bar, along the steps and even on the fireplace mantle—from Gorky Gonzalez, Mayolica Pottery of Santa Rosa, and other local artists.

 
Both bedrooms, on the second floor, were generous, with sliding doors and balconies showcasing the incredible view of Guanajuato and the mountains. Beds had heavy, hand-carved headboards.  The master bedroom even had a fireplace and a changing room, and the master bath had a sunken jetted tub, which Aryk enjoyed, and a hand-painted sink, which Noxy occasionally napped in. 
 
Master bedroom with fireplace
The volume and quantity of the artwork throughout the apartment made my jaw drop daily. A brightly-painted, skeletal, smiling Catrina statue stood inside the front door, next to a small painting of a Lucha Libre warrior. A handcrafted wooden monk statue looked down from a lighted alcove at the bottom of the wide stairway. There were painted ceramic serving platters, a full-length copper lamp, a basket crucifix over the bed in the master bedroom, a Diego Rivera print in the main hallway, hand-woven rugs, and tapestries.

Catrina
 
Mayolica

Mayolica
 

Diego Rivera print

The Grounds

 And beyond our apartment, there was so much more to explore and enjoy! Casa Estrella’s public space was beautiful and comfortable, with leather couches, a huge solid wood dining table with a tile-covered wall over the banquet, a large covered deck, even a big double-kitchen for use by guests staying in rooms without kitchen facilities. (Casa Estrella also provided a delicious, healthy daily breakfast for an additional fee, consisting of yogurt, granola, fresh fruit, tamales, and coffee.)
 
Yoga with Blanca
Beyond the main building, there was a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi. Down the steps, the Fiesta Fitness Room offered an elliptical, complete weight set, free weights, Bosu, exercise ball, barre and more, as well as a large patio for weekly outdoor yoga classes (by Blanca of Casa Quatro in Guanajuato) offering the mountain view as the perfect “dristy.” There was also a spa room for massages, a botanical garden, a tennis court, an RV park with a beautiful bathroom and shower, an organic garden, and other public spaces.
 

Wellness

 I mention all these things because Casa Estrella’s focus is on wellness, and I left feeling so relaxed and serene. Javier, the manager and concierge, gave us exceptional service to made us feel truly pampered. If you ever decide to visit Guanajuato, you can learn more about Casa Estrella here. Tell Javier that Lisa sent you!
 
Saying goodbye to Javier., the manager and concierge at Casa Estrella.
Hasta luego!
By Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt
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Torture and Death in Mexico

We visited three morbid museums that reflect a certain
obsession with death and torture in Guanajuato, Mexico.

El Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato 
(The Mummy Museum)

 
The one that attracts the most tourists is El Museo de lasMomias de Guanajuato, or the Mummy Museum of Guanajuato. This underground museum tucked into a corner
of the old city displays scores of naturally mummified bodies found to be in surprisingly good shape when they were disinterred to make room for new bodies in the cemetery above.
 
The mummies were discovered in the late 1800’s after the government instituted a perpetual burial tax on the cemetery. If the families of the buried did not pay, the bodies of their loved ones were exhumed. It was during this process of evicting the dead for back taxes that the mummies were discovered, beautifully preserved.
 
 
 
 
After exhumation, the mummies were stored in an ossuary beneath the cemetery, where they are displayed today. Each mummy has a tag with a little information about them and theories on how they died. Many of them are still wearing the clothes they were buried in.
 
The most interesting to me was the mummy pair of a mother and her unborn child, advertised by the museum as the smallest mummy in the world.
 
Mama
Baby
In addition to the mummies, the place is full of existential quotes such as the following:
 

“Man must open himself to death if he wants to open himself to life.
The cult to life is also cult to death.
A civilization that denies death ends up denying life. “

–Octavio Paz
 
(Source: https://museodelasmomiasdeguanajuato.negocio.site/)

La Casa de Los Lamentos
(The House of Wailing)

 
La Casa de Los Lamentos is a cheesy House of Horrors located in a historic 18th-century mansion where serial murders occurred in the 1890s and early 1900s. The story goes that the owner, Tadeo Fulgencio Mejia, was obsessed with trying to contact his dead wife, Constanza, and committed an unknown number of murders as human sacrifices to perform rituals in an attempt to reach her. Human bones were supposedly found in the mansion’s basement.
 

 

 

 
The museum uses red and flickering lighting, slammed doors and other sound effects, a Hitchcock-style video in a picture frame, and ghostly holograms to scare the BeJesus out of the unfortunate who walk in and pay the 45 pesos admission. We stumbled upon it while exploring the Valenciana neighborhood and it was a hoot!
 
But we were the ones wailing at the end, because we came out of the museum to a colossal downpour. We had walked half a mile down the hill from Casa Estrella and had to wait out the tormenta before we could walk back. But what a diverting hour or two!

El Museo Casa del Purgatorio
(The Purgatory House Museum)

We stumbled upon El Museo Casa del Purgatorio, tucked innocuously into an alley near the Templo de San Cayetano (Saint Cayetano Church), while walking around the little village of Valenciana, down the road from our lodging. Aryk and Lexie were with us for this exploration of a museum that turned out to be about methods of torture and killing during the 18th century Spanish Inquisition in Mexico, when people were persecuted and killed for being Catholic.
 
Methods of torture we experienced through our guide included a spinning wheel into excrement (sort of an extreme sort of water boarding), the stretching table, the guillotine, and of course the gallows. The museum even featured a small cemetery with a replica of the tomb of El Pipila, the hero of the Mexican Independence movement – despite the fact that this iconic miner hero wasn’t even caught and tortured, but apparently lived to the ripe old age of 83 before dying in his hometown of San Miguel de Allende.

 

 

 

 
This museum was so gruesome that Lex had to leave and waited outside. The rest of us enjoyed it in a perverse way.
 
By Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt

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Mexico, My Tummy and Advice from Kelly Clarkson

I am sitting by the pool of Casa Estrella in Guanajuato,
looking out at the spectacular view that has become warmly familiar in the five
and a half weeks we have been here. I have barely eaten in three days.
Blame my tummy. And my determination to experience everything
Mexico has to offer.

Gastronomic Curiosity


Since we are trying to experience true Mexico and not
tourist Mexico, we are NOT eating at the Hard Rock Café or the typical tourist
traps. We are eating the Mexican way.
My first street food foray, in Leon:
An Agua Fresca Mandarina (Mandarin Orange Fresh Water)
straight out of a plastic bag. It was delicious,
gave me no side effects, and emboldened me to be adventurous!
We only drink bottled water, like all Mexicans. We buy local
produce, bread, chicken and fish at local mercados (markets) and tianguis
(pop-up markets), which means we have to ignore the presence of the flies and wash
everything carefully with disinfectant before we can eat them. We enjoy meals from
puestos, food carts, often with seats, eating tacos, tortas and lonches (different types of sandwiches, filled with meat and cometimes smothered with sauce) and gorditos (little filled pancakes).
We love buying raspadas, which are shave-ice and syrupy fresh fruit, often
accompanied by sugar-drunk bees.
A delicious cup full of salmonella
(Just kidding –  raspadas never made us sick.
Only supremely happy. Every damn day.)
We love to eat at out-of-the-way, hole-in-the-wall places,
where we have made some magnificent discoveries. I found the best green salsa I
experienced in Mexico, with mouthwatering chunks of avocado, at a walk-up food
stand in the Mercado at Plaza Embajadoras. Whenever I can, I indulge in Horchatas
and Horchata Fresas, a uniquely Mexican rice, cinnamon and vanilla drink that
is made even better by adding fresh strawberries.
My favorite street food in Tlaquepaque: Elote (corn)
with a (mystery) crema (cream of indeterminate origin)
and queso (shredded cheese)
o
We drink Mexican craft beers, local mescals, and a variety of
tequilas. We indulge in nieve de garafas, ice cream handmade in metal jugs
with ice and energetic stirring with a wooden mallet. Flavors include elote
(corn), pay de manzana (apple pie, with real pieces of pie), queso de zarzamora
(blackberry cheesecake), Ferrero Rocher, Nescafe, and often 10 or 20 more. Bob’s
favorite place in Tlaquepaque offered at least 60 flavors.

Hecho a Mano


Everything is handmade in Mexico. Who knows how often hands
are washed. You just have to not think about it.
The best salsa in the world …

… and the pork tacos I smothered with them
And the fact is, sometimes you don’t have a choice where you eat. You’re driving to the beach and there’s only one restaurant to choose from at the mid-point when everyone’s hungry. So you chow down and hope for the best. And sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind if you really want to experience a place.

Paying the Price


So occasionally we pay the price for our adventurousness with
a few days of service to the commode. I
don’t think you need me to explain the symptoms. It has happened to Beto and me
twice and Lex only once (she is not as adventurous, which may be a good thing). 
Each bout takes four or five days to recover, during which
we rest a lot (because we’re weak and moving is painful) and enjoy a riveting
diet of ginger ale, Saladitas (Saltine crackers), Gatorade and chicken and rice
soup. We call them inadvertent dieting opportunities, which have given us a chance to shed the pounds we gained scarfing down ice cream through every city we visited in Europe last fall. I assume each tummy bout makes our systems stronger and more acclimated to whatever may be in the food.
I look at it this way: When we first moved to Mexico, I had issues with my legs, calves, and Achilles tendons for the first two months as my body adjusted to the fact that I was walking many miles every day on hard sidewalks or cobblestone in flat shoes. My stomach has had to make the same adjustment to different foods, spices, and even microorganisms. 

To Quote Kelly Clarkson

As Kelly Clarkson would say, “What doesn’t kill you makes
you stronger!”

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Don Quixote in Guanajuato

Today we visited El Museo Iconografico de Don Quixote, or the Iconographic Museum of Don Quixote, a truly unique museum you won’t find anywhere else but in Guanajuato. 
There is a big bronze statue of the fictional character Don
Quixote right outside, and a brilliant baritone singing in front of the house
next door, so who we were we to say no?

Who the Heck is Don Quixote?

For those not well-versed in literary endeavors, Don Quixote
is a fictional character created by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes in a
book rather awkwardly titled The Ingenious Gentleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha. This
is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, Don
Quixote is the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish
literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on
lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that
cites Don Quixote as the authors’ choice for the “best literary
work ever written”.

Needless to say, no one in my family has read it, not
even Aryk, the writer and English Literature major. This is what Wikipedia says
it is about:

The story follows the adventures of a noble (hidalgo) named Alonso Quixano who reads so
many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity
and decides to become a knight-errant (caballero
andante), reviving chivalry and serving his country, under the name Don
Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho
Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing
with Don Quixote’s rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood.
Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it
is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story.

Don Quixote and My Mother

My late mother’s favorite musical was The Man of La Mancha, a 1965 musical about Don Quixote. She would have really enjoyed this museum. If you have ever heard the song The Impossible Dream, you should know it comes from this musical. (I realize this is irrelevant, but I had to share it anyway.) 
The museum, located a couple of blocks off the main
square, was founded in 1987 by the collector Eulalio Ferrer Rodríguez, a former
captain in the Spanish Civil War who, legend has it, traded a pack of cigarettes
for the book Don Quixote, and the book helped keep him
sane and captured his imagination during the time he spent in a refugee camp in
France. An entrepreneur involved in communications and advertising, he later immigrated
to Mexico and brought his devotion to Don Quixote to Guanajuato, which is now
famous for its annual, month-long Cervantino festival – even though Cervantes himself
never set foot in this city!
Eulalio Ferre Rodriguez


An Amazing Variety of Art

The museum is quite good. It’s situated in what was
probably the mansion of a mine-owner, and it houses in 16 rooms a striking collection
of different types of pieces by different artists whose theme revolves around
the figure of Don Quixote and the rest of the characters in the novel. There
are bronze sculptures, surreal paintings, sketches, multimedia pieces and more!
Here are a few of my favorites.

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Car Setbacks (a.k.a. Shit Happens)

All was not completely smooth in our trip across the country
and into Mexico,as we ran into several car-related setbacks.

First, the Car Accident

The first came in late August when Lexie was working on
getting her driver’s license. One Saturday we decided to get some interstate
driving experience in and drive north on I-76, away from the crowded metro Denver
area. We were concentrating on watching cars that were merging onto the highway,
as Denver drivers have a bad habit of expecting cars already on the highway to
yield to them. Driving in the right-hand lane, we came to an entrance ramp
where a car and medium sized U-Haul truck had just gotten on the merge ramp. We
were opposite the truck so we couldn’t speed up, but before we could even slow
down the U-Haul moved right into our lane. Lexie’s immediate reaction was to
shift left to avoid the truck, but unfortunately, another car was there. We hit
that car, bounced off, and Lexie lost control. Suddenly we were heading for the
concrete median at 65 mph. Crash! Airbags deployed. Things didn’t end well for
the truck, or for Lexie’s hand, which was broken and in a cast for 6 weeks. 
The U-Haul
driver just drove on up the road. I assume he never even saw
us.

Chain Reaction

This set off a chain reaction. First, we had to find a new
truck. Unfortunately, we had already ordered a custom topper which only fit
Toyota Tacomas through 2015, and it was black. So we started looking, all over
the country for a low-mileage 2015 Tacoma in a color compatible with black.
This consumed valuable time that we needed for packing and finishing up on the
house, but we eventually found a charcoal one in the Denver area that had about
50,000 miles less than our older 2012 truck.

 License & Registration

The accident also meant that Lexie wouldn’t be able to get
her driver’s license in Colorado, because she could not drive again till she
got her cast off, which would be only a few days before our scheduled
departure. We would have to figure out that later.
And it created some difficulties in getting license plates
and registration for the new car in Colorado since CO had recently switched to
a new computer system which had created a backlog.

Next, the Battery

Our troubles in CO weren’t over yet. On the day before we
were scheduled to leave, the new truck wouldn’t start. We had it jumped and I
took it to NAPA to get the battery tested. The battery was bad, and I changed
it out in the NAPA parking lot.

Then, Rear-Ended

For our last meal in the Denver area, we decided to go to
Woody’s Pizza in Golden, our favorite pizza place. They make a wide variety of delicious
pizzas, and you go to the counter and grab a slice of whatever pizza just came
out of the oven. On the way, we were stopped at a red light on a fairly major
road, 2nd in line. Traffic was stopped behind us. The light turned
green, but the person in front of decided he wanted to change lanes so he
didn’t move until traffic on our left had cleared. As we sat waiting, the woman
in a large truck behind us suddenly rammed into the back of our truck. Our
truck was half packed, but fortunately it was drivable, with only damage to our
tailgate and bumper. Because of our tight travel schedule to make it across the
country and catch a plane to Europe, it would be three months before we could
get the damage repaired.
The new truck with topper, right before the accident
So we had to drive across the country with a badly damaged
bumper held on by a bungee cord.

Our Car Registration Expires

We parked our truck at Lisa’s brother’s house in northern
Virginia and he graciously took us to the airport for our European trip. During
the time away, our temporary Colorado registration expired, so we had to call
the car dealership from Greece to get an extension sent to Lisa’s brother so we
wouldn’t be driving illegally when we got back.

Back to Lexie’s Driver’s License

Back from Europe, our plan was to spend some time in our
Vermont house and get Lexie the driving practice necessary to pass the test. Then
we would both fly back to CO, get the new car registration and take the test.
However, since we own property in Vermont we investigated whether Lexie could
get her license and whether we could register the car there. We found out we
could do both, and now Lexie is a resident of Vermont. We also registered the
car there. Vermont DMV took our CO title and told us it would be a few weeks
before our registration and title would arrive in the mail (to our Colorado
address).
Unfortunately, the weather was abnormally snowy so we didn’t
get as much driving practice in as we expected, still Lexie was ready to take
the test a few days before our scheduled departure. Unfortunately, she didn’t
pass, mostly because the examiner didn’t like the way she parallel-parked the
truck. (Personally, I completely avoid parallel parking the truck because I
can’t do it.) She actually parallel-parked perfectly, but before she had time
to straighten the wheels out, the instructor told her she was finished and to
move on – and then deducted points for not straightening out the truck!
It was frustrating, but we rescheduled the test for the day
before we were scheduled to leave VT. Then, just as we were getting into the
truck to go to the test, the examiner called us and told us that a mistake had
been made and that they rescheduled the new test too early, as Vermont has a three-day
waiting period between tests. That meant that Lexie still doesn’t have her
license, which we will have to take care of this summer.

Cracked Windshield

We embarked on our trip to Mexico in early January, and on
the second day on the road, we took a stone to the windshield which caused a
crack. We didn’t want to go into Mexico with that so, as we were driving, we
scheduled a glass repair while we were staying at our AirBnB in New Orleans the
next day.

Troubles at the Border

We’ve previously documented our problems in getting into
Mexico because we still hadn’t received our permanent registration from Vermont
– read that blog. 

Sidetracked by the Gas Crisis

And, follow our problems in getting the whole way to
Guadalajara due to the gas crisis in Mexico here! 

Rising Above

However, even with all of the minor setbacks, we made it to
Mexico and have started our new life — and we certainly have learned how to
handle adversity! And sometimes the setbacks provided unforeseen advantages. Because
of the accident, we have a newer car that is better able to handle rough
Mexican roads. Because of the gas crisis, we discovered a city we never would
have thought to visit, Leon.
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Welcome to Messy Suitcase on You Tube! Part 1: Launching a New Life

Messy Suitcase is on YouTube!

We are officially launching the Messy Suitcase YouTube channel. Please visit, subscribe, and follow us on our adventures in Mexico and beyond!  Because life is short and the world is big.  #messysuitcase #lifeisshorttheworldisbig

Subscribe to our blog: https://messysuitcase.blogspot.com/

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Reach us by email at messysuitcase@gmail.com

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Getting Broken Saxophones Repaired

(Even though we have moved on to Guanajuato, we still have a few blogs from our life in Tlaquepaque to post. Enjoy!)

We have two saxophones here in Mexico. Because I routinely
play an alto, I keep it on a stand. Unfortunately, one night the nocturnal cat
activities got a little too rambunctious and they knocked my sax onto the hard
tile floor. My sax had some damage and needed to go into the repair shop.

Lex plays the bari sax, and one day one of her keys no
longer functioned properly. It needed to go into the shop, too.
Back in Colorado, we knew of several good shops. In
Guadalajara, we didn’t know of any. Mr. Google provided several potential
musical instrument repair shops. Then we had to use WhatsApp, in Spanish, to
find out whether they repaired saxophones. Fortunately, Mr. Google provided a
picture of the front of one shop, Taller (Workshop) Rodriguez e Hijos, which had
a sign which said they repaired saxophones. They became the de facto winner.

The sign says: Repair of All Types of Woodwind instruments, including Clarinets, Trumpets, trombones and Saxophones, Gold-Plated, Nickel, Chrome

Visiting Rodriguez e Hijos

Lex and I Ubered to the shop on a Monday afternoon. No
Spanish spoken there, but we managed to convey what we needed. The sax expert
came out and gave our saxophones a thorough examination. Then, in very rapid
Spanish, he explained to us what he needed to do. Neither Lex or I understood a
word he said, we just nodded in agreement. He did point out four areas that my
sax needed work on. When we asked him when they would be ready, he told us three
days.
I also asked how much he thought it would cost and he told
us that he wouldn’t know until he did his work. I left with a little concern,
since we gave both saxophones to someone we didn’t know and with no idea what
it would cost us to get them back.

Bob’s happy saxophone

Lexie’s rejuvenated bari sax

Lex and I returned on Thursday, and as promised the
saxophones were ready. I took mine out and played a few notes. It sounded good.

Then Came the Bill

I then asked the question I was almost afraid to ask – how
much was the bill? To my astonishment, the bill was $450MXN, or less than
$25USD. I gave him the money and we were off.
I don’t know exactly what was done, but I can guarantee you
that the work would have cost us at least $150 USD back in Lakewood, and
certainly wouldn’t have been done in 3 days.
But both saxophones were fixed and now sound the way they
should.
Thank you Taller Rodriguez e Hijos!

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Cristo Rey: The Heart of Mexico

Today we traveled to the corazon (heart) of Mexico to see the iconic statue of Cristo Rey. This imposing bronze statue of Christ the King, 75 feet tall and rising 8,461 feet above sea level at Mexico’s geographical center, looms from atop a mountain above the town of Silao called El Cubillo
del Cubilete.


Cristo Rey
Cristo Rey
 

The monumental Christ of the Mountain was created in art deco style by artist Nicholas Mariscal in 1944 to honor the struggle of Christians during a period of religious persecution in the early 1900s. 

In the words of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, the statue serves as a “rebuke to the suppressors of religious freedom” who sought to quash the Church during the persecution of Christians in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century.

A smaller previous monument was dynamited in 1928 by the anti-religious (and particularly anti-Catholic) regime of President Plutarco Elías Calles, as part of his mission to kill Christian rebels and destroy all Christian symbols during the nation’s critical “Cristero War” when state atheism was enforced.  (Source: Wikipedia)

A Holy Shrine for Mexicans

Few Americans have even heard of Cristo Rey and El Cubillo del Cubilete, but to Mexicans, this is a holy place where many make a pilgrimage. At the foot of the statue is basilica in the shape of a globe where pilgrims visit throughout the year, especially in November, when Catholics celebrate the Feast of Christ the King. This elegant sanctuary, with its enormous crown of thorns encircling the ceiling and its gold-coated crown in the center, is one of the most visited churches in Mexico. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t stroll through it and take pictures because I was wearing shorts, which are
forbidden attire in the sanctuary.)
 
Sanctuary
Crown of thorns
 
Golden crown for Christ the King

Incredible Vistas

 
The 360-degree panoramic view from the base of the monument is truly spectacular. Guanajuato is having an extremely dry May, and we could see a number of forest fires in the distant mountains. In fact, on the drive to the shrine, we came within a few feet of one. Learn more. 

Side Trips

On the way, we stopped to eat lunch on the covered veranda of a beautiful hacienda surrounded by grape vines called Jesus Maria, which served up wonderful wine, pasta, salads and seafood. 
 
Our family and Javier enjoying dinner
We also visited the village of La Luz, where we stopped into the fascinating, ancient church named Maria de la Luz.
 
 
Maria de la Luz
 
Because this is a big mining region, the crucifix had miners’ helmets, tools and rocks at its base.
 

Thank you, Javier!

 
The tour was conducted by Javier Salazar, general manager of Casa Estrella Wellness Center, where we are staying. He made for a very knowledgeable and sometimes devilishly funny tour guide! 

By Lisa Hamm-Greenawalt

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We have a new name!

“Life is Short, the World is Big” is our philosophy, our passion, our lifestyle, our motivation, our inspiration.

But as a blog title, it was just TOO LONG!

So we are in the process of changing the name of the blog to Messy Suitcase! After all, we are living out of a few suitcases stuffed into the back of our truck (along with three musical instruments, three cats and our youngest child, Lex, who is on a gap year from college). OK, we let the cats and Lex sit in the back seat, but you get the point!

Every few months, we pack up those suitcases — often with “help” from the cats — and head for our next destination, where we again live out of messy suitcases!

Connect to Messy Suitcase on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube — and watch for our YouTube channel to get a lot busier.

Thanks for supporting Bob and Lisa in our travels … because life is short & the world is big!

Do you recognize Ellie Smoit, the Adventure Cat, in our new logo?

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