Our four lovely fur babies.  We miss them all.

Monday is our day but it was delayed to Wednesday. This is Colin on the table. He is in much better shape that I am. Our rear ender did a number on my back and shoulders.  Ouch! Monday is just around the corner.  I really need that second massage.

Both the kale and Swiss chard have geminated. They were planted Saturday.

My plants along the west wall are already happy and showing some blooms.

All these shrimpers plus dozens more had come in because of the coming storm.

We discovered that ants have been eating the leaves on this plant.

My portulaca seeds from a package. I also have seeds from my portulaca plant at home but have yet to plant them.

We spent late Wednesday afternoon moving things and lifting items out of the way of the wind and coming rain storm.  Many items were  put into the truck of the car.

Happy hour over at Jose and Pat’s.  Colin’s grand entrance wearing pajamas.

We had received an email from Marjorie that the noseeums were bad and to come prepared.  So while I stayed with the RV mid radiator repair in Tucson Colin headed out to Walmart to pick up a pair of PJ’s to wear to happy hour as well as four cans of bug spray with Deet. Pierre has been wearing PJ’s for two years now and is not getting bit.

It certainly added to the fun in happy hour.

The very large Norwegian Joy heading out.

A unique sunset. The clouds were thick and as you now know the rain started at 1AM.

I have read many reports and it appears that a 1991 rain record was beat in Mazatlan yesterday.  Some say 8.8 inches in twelve hours.  We can attest to that.  Others say 11.5 but I wonder if that is for the entire month of November.  Regardless it was a huge amount of rain. Click here for a stunning view of the damage.  Apparently in 3 or 4 districts flooding went right up to the second story of the home or business.  If you are interested the Facebook page for

Wuzhappnin in Mazatlán

has many photos of what happened.  Here are some photos including cars that were underwater.  The water will recede within 24 hours but the mud and dirt remain much longer.

Stayed tuned for the next update.  We are no longer under water.

We woke up to about 5 minutes of rain at 6AM and rushed to close windows and vents but it was soon over.  However I heard from someone over in Las Jaibas and in Playa Sur that they had more rain than that.  The day was humid and muggy.

Colin spent Tuesday morning changing out the dead strings of lights for new ones.

I worked with all the plants along the west wall.  They needed to be cut back, others removed along with some weeds.

The plant man showed up a day early and I got three lovely tall palms to plant and three hibiscus.  Colin planted the latter and we are waiting for Ismael to plant the palmas.  He also had brought his spray system as he was spraying the plants over at El Velero and offered to spray my sick plants at no charge 😎

We now have an ambulance on the Isla.  I have seen it used three times in the past week.  Nice to have it.  Generally they will take you to the embarcadero where a boat will be waiting to transport you to the Mazatlan side and another ambulance will be waiting to take you to hospital

Lots of beach activity Tuesday. This group had never been on a horse and a good deal of time was spent explaining things to them before the riders mounted up.

Despite the weather many enjoyed the beach.

Later in the afternoon as I sat reading I had a glare in my eye. Pretty neat. Just enough light coming through the clouds.  There was no sunset that night.

Just as it was getting dark Erik showed up to check out the area our new battery tray and batteries would go.  Erik is under the slide out. That is the new tray and two of the four batteries bottom right.  It is going to fit just perfectly.

Erik is also measuring how much battery cable he needs to attach the new ones.

I have no idea how many people I thought I was going to feed Tuesday night.

Fortunately we have a large electric frypan.  The stir fry was excellent, our first fresh shrimp of the season.  I know that George would have loved this meal.  With I could send you some.  Love leftovers.

There were three cruise ships in port Tuesday, we saw one come in and two go out quite late.  The noseuums were bad likely because of the humidity and no breeze and I was inside by 4PM.

We knew a storm was coming for Wednesday and for Thursday ( today – real time ).  Turns out that the rain only began at 1AM this morning (Thursday ) and it rained very heavily for twelve hours.  Then it rained off and on for another six hours, until about 7PM.  We got up at 1AM and closed vents and some windows and then up again at 3AM as the rain was coming thru the vents and ever so slightly open windows.  I had to turn the A/C on.  At 6:30 this morning I had drops of water falling inside from the A/C unit.  There was just too much humidity even inside.

Of course we were under water.  The waves were huge and coming right up to the fence netting.

Pretty sure we got well over the 2 inches that were forecasted.  We are in that dark red area to the right of La Paz with the black in the middle.   Quite the weather for all of the US as well.

Our friend Joyce who lives here year round says that this was the most intense rain storm of the entire rainy season. She is calling the roads here on the Isla, Mexican swimming pools.  Not easily navigated.

The RV site to our left.

Colin checking out our patio.

We had prepared for the storm Wednesday afternoon by taking down chairs and plastic tables, anything that could become a projectile in the wind.  We even moved some of the smaller plant pots to under the palapa.  Everything under the palapa was wet, the rain came in sideways with the wind.  Late this afternoon Colin had to go out and dump the water from some of my plant pots as they plants were drowning.

The street as viewed from Nancy & Randy’s apartment.  A true dirty Mexican swimming pool.  This is about three blocks from us.

Happy Thanksgiving to our US friends.  Sadly here in Mazatlan many of the specially prepared Thanksgiving dinners at restaurants  were cancelled due to flooding in the streets of the city. Schools were closed today, as well as musical events this evening.  This was a most serious storm.  Even the shrimpers come in to ride it out.

Click here to view Carol’s blog post about the storm and her dramatic photos at her RV Park in Mazatlan.

So we spent the day reading both online and a book for me and of course guitar playing for Colin.  Nothing else to do.  Much too wet to be outside.  Of course we lost the TV signal, too bad as we would have enjoyed watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I imagine that it will take a few days to dry up and clean the patio yet again, reposition our things, etc and then perhaps we can begin to enjoy our normal Isla vacation.  We do have to pick up our laundry Saturday, hopefully the streets will be passable by then.

At 8:40PM it is still 96% humidity outside and 80% inside.

Any questions asked form my last blog post are always answered but you do have to go back to see my reply.

It was a lovely day but there is a storm approaching.  More rain.

All the palms are getting taller which means that we all are getting less shade.  We along with many others put up our beach umbrella.  In our case three pieces of rebar surrounding the umbrella base and then many zip ties to hold it into place re the wind, etc.

We got our cuties, as I call them, up.

Some of you may remember that we lost the small ball of this threesome last December due to an RV neighbours off leash  cat.  This had been a Christmas gift from Colin in 2017 and I loved it and the colours.  The best I could come up with was this teal ball, a piece of art itself.

Next on Monday’s to do list was to sort out our wine.  That involved bringing it all out.

Quite the process storing it in the basement, lots of storage behind the stair area.

Ta-da! My haul for this winter. The white and blue boxes, top left, were brought here directly from Canada.  They were declared but no tax needed to be paid.  Each box holds 5 and 1/4 bottles of top notch B.C. Peller Estates Proprietor’s Reserve Pinot Grigio which happens to be one of our two house wines back home. Four larger boxes held 4 boxes of wine.  A great way to travel to Mexico with wine.  It takes up so little space.

The rest of the wine was purchased in the US.  Not always an easy task to find good wines at reasonable prices. A few cases were the cheaper but good SB from Charles Shaw and other more expensive wines.  Even more difficult was to create an even mix of these wines which ended up being about a 16 day or more rotation.  Some years we have had an excess and I have sold the wine to others before we left for the same price that I paid.  Last year I was right on and we had the exact amount of wine needed until we crossed into Canada.  It was a hot and humid day and Colin kept hauling wine cases all over the place.  I brought 4 sets into the RV and he had to put the rest back into the basement but they were a mixed box which will be easy to pull out as needed.  At least we now have a variety of Pinot Grigios and Sauvignon Blancs to enjoy over a 2.5 week period before the next set commences.  I love the New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc ( the bright green caps ) that we were able to get at the Vegas Costco.  We had much better luck in getting a variety of wonderful wines last fall in Alburqueque.   I am happy with what I have and the mix is good.

My first double hibiscus from one of last years plants. Yes, I know it is a soft focus.  Sometimes I am in too much of a hurry.

Love the light on this one.

Ismael came and planted our three new bougainvillea.  Of course we can mange to do this ourselves but this is a way to give some extra money to him and his family.

A cloudy sunset, the storm is coming.

Yes Monday was a good day.

I realized today that I had forgotten to bring sugar for the hummingbirds.  The Mexican sugar is coarser and someone told me not as sweet.  However I used my normal ratio of 1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup of water and the birds are happy.  The plant man showed up but his truck was bare.  He said that he had gone to RV2 first and they bought everything, the same thing happened our first Sunday here. I did buy three bougainvillea from him. I told him what else I needed and he said that he would bring the plants on Wednesday.  We shall see. I did invite him into our yard to show him the plants that have been eaten and he told us that it was ants. So we will put down some Home Defense around the one bush.  He also told me that a few of my hibiscus have a fungal bacterial disease.

At dusk, this jet ski came pretty close to the banana boat who had just dumped its passengers.  I know its a bad snap shot but I wanted to photograph  how dangerously close the jet ski was.

While I put the tablecloths on our palapa tables and hemmed the corners so that no-one would trip over the extra material Colin was creating a different lighting pattern.  Now we can put on just a few lights plus the tree but can add the other lights when we chose to.

Sunset brought us a bridal couple. Her veil was naturally flowing in the breeze and the colour was perfect but the photographer had his back turned.

We did so many little things that I can’t remember them all.  The days are passing swiftly but our yard is beginning to look like our Isla home once again.  The very tall bougainvillea I planted nine years ago need to be pruned back a good 5 -7 feet as the bottom is dying as it needs more light.  Also we can now see through to the dusty road due to the lack of leaves.  Likely we will prune a few feet now and do the rest in March before we leave.

I didn’t realize until I looked at this tonight that the photographer has his back turned again. The sun was going down quickly.  Hopefully they got some special photos.

I spent a good part of the day online while sitting outside going through all my emails and am happy to say that I am down to 80. I hope to half that in a few days.  I still haven’t started a new novel yet. I am really trying to get the yard caught up.

While I work on my blog after sunset Colin plays. He just loves this ragged piece of music. He has a new copy but likes tp lay with this one.

Mexico is the first country in the world to be certified rabies free.  You can read about that here.  Plus a Mexican student has created  rubber roof pavement, that article can be found here.  That is pretty amazing.

Our solar lights appear to have survived being in storage since March. Two of them are iffy.

We left the lights here all summer and they were mostly working but extremely dusty. One set in the middle of string was not and Colin decided to change them all because it was easier than having to do another repair  in another week or two.

We ended the day with a lovely tuna pie and a huge Caesar salad.  I just found out today ( in real time ) that our romaine was from Salinas, California, an area where  romaine has been found to cause food poisoning. That article is here. So far so good  😯