Oh, hi! I haven’t seen you in awhile.

I am back from Mexico. In case it was not clear why I even went down there in the first place, it was to renew my work visa, because while the hotel I used to manage is owned by my sister and brother-in-law, everything is in my name and thus, once a year, I have to go down there and renew my visa, which takes about a month or so. This is not to be confused with the trip I took back in March, which was also paperwork-related but of the much shorter, simpler variety.

To renew one’s visa in Mexico, as with any bureaucratic process in any country, is no quick task. It’s also not impossible. It basically involves following directions, carrying around about 10 pounds of documents, making multiple copies of about a third of those documents, and then diligently checking back with the immigration agents to see how they are coming along with your papers. The last point is perhaps the trickiest, because it involves keeping your cool at all times and proffering big, beaming smiles, even when you feel like drop-kicking someone across Cancun. Last summer, however, I discovered that by telling them I am leaving the country for more than two months, and that I am leaving in about a week, things move along a lot faster. That combined with also revealing that I live in Isla Mujeres and that every time they make me return to the office, I have to take a ferry and a taxi to get there, is pretty much the key. Do it and you will likely get what you need, when you need it, without ever raising your voice. It’s brilliant and it’s what I did and that is how I was able to wrap it all up after a mere four trips to immigration, getting me back to Austin yesterday, not even a month after I had left.

But with nearly four weeks in which to do just that, I was left with a lot of time to read, write, lie in the sun, frolic in the waves, hang out with old friends, make new ones, drink too much tequila, play Scrabble and think, and it’s that last point upon which I would like to dwell for a moment.

Can you read my writing in this note?

It’s a list of some ideas that I had, while sitting in Mexico and pondering where to go with this trip and this blog and this writing project of mine. It was on my mind a lot and it was the reason behind my hiatus from being on here and in the end, I figured out that I am not tired of the trip at all, because I was worried I might be; rather, I am just tired of the way I have been doing it. It took me nearly 10 months to figure out where I needed to go with things but so it goes sometimes. Starting now then, here is what you are going to see on here: a lot of photos and not so many words; more posts; and no podcasts, though maybe the occasional snippet of audio. The rest you will just have to read about in the book.

And so with that, here’s a gallery of images from my three weeks and five days South of the Border. A lot of faces are missing, because I kept forgetting to take my camera out and about with me, but these are the moments that I did manage to catch.