Short Days, But Not For Long

Today is the shortest day of the year, which means that each day from here on out is about two minutes longer! The Winter Solstice is a time of ritualistic observance for many cultues. I looked it up to see what we can expect here in Mexico, but found that only the Maya culture saw this time as special, it was thought to be a dangerous time in which there were no divisions between the mortal and immortal worlds. About the only thing I read that this culture did during this time, was they tried not to leave their houses, and they didn't comb their hair. So I think we probably will have a quiet night in Melaque.

We sat out on the beach last night and watched the sun go down. There is a natural hole in the rock outcropping that forms the Northwest part of the bay. As the sun sets, you can see the hole fill with light and because the sun moves to the west and lowers on the horizon it fills the rock hole giving you a bright eye effect. This time of year provides the perfect alignment of sun, horizon and hole; the effect is very cool.

This morning Linda and I went for an 11 mile ride on our bikes. We wound through the small towns that lay across the main highway. One of our volleyball buddy's, Bob, gave us directions on how to get over there and how to find an unused highway that was built and then abandoned. He explained everything twice to us, but we both lost track of the directions after he said "go across the highway, towards the big rock, turn left down and alley, then left again and then go through a town and go right then left..." We actually found the abandoned highway at about mile five. It is very strange to see the road that no one uses! It looks like they drive on it a bit, but we only saw one car parked on the side of the road and we could see quite a ways down it. I think it was build to allow traffic to go around Melaque, but I can't figure why it is not used. We returned to our beach house after about 2 hours, arriving just in time to play vollyball in the morning session.