The Best Part of Every Trip

...is when the Plotniks have been home a day or two and The Great Plotnik decides it's time to take out his box of colored pins and add new pins to the map. "MORE PINS," after all, is Plottie's New Year's Resolution every year ("work harder," "worry less," "paint your masterpiece," OK, he makes those resolutions too but they're harder to keep) and it's a grand moment when he and Ducknik insert the proof of their most recent travels.

It was hard this time, because there was already a little yellow pin in Oaxaca, the result of Plot's stay there many decades ago, and it wasn't easy to find room for the Big Yellow pin which needed to go into Puebla, because Mexico City has a Big Red pin in it (since all the Plotniks vacationed there in 1983, a few months before the earthquake destroyed the hotel they'd been staying in). Mexico City is only an hour and a half from Puebla and that's not enough miles to allow easy insertion of a new Big Yellow.

But now it's done. Two nice, shiny and new Big Yellows. The Plotniks celebrated yesterday with fresh, hot tortillas from La Palma with avocados and Oaxaca cheese from Casa Lucas. Of course, they would have done that anyway.

Perhaps a little explanation of the map would be helpful. The Big Red pins are family vacations. We see Big Reds in Puerto Vallarta and Mexico City (which was the above-mentioned trip taken when Ducknik was six months-plus pregnant with Bronnie, and the toilet didn't work, and she got sick, and ai, chihuahua) and also in Cozumel and Merida (the trip with JJ-aka-PP where little BZ lost her front tooth in the sea and big brother PD dove down and found it for her amongst the rocks).

The three Big Blue pins are Duck and Plot's trip at the beginning of last year to Guatemala. The pins represent the areas they stayed in -- Antigua/Lake Atitlan/ Chichicastenango on the left, Livingston (on the Caribbean) on the right and the ruins of Tikal (in the jungle) on top.

There is one more Big Yellow visible on the bottom, which seems to be in the middle of Nicaragua, which represents PD's trip down there for Chris and Genicia's wedding, and if Plottie had the picture of Punk on the horse with his charango, serenading Chris, who is on the other horse, both of them drunk as skunks, he'd most definitely be posting it here right now.

Now, the little yellows all seem to represent towns where The Great Plotniko spent time in 1965 -- there's Villahermosa, on the Caribbean, where he got bitten by mosquitoes; and there's La Ventosa below that, on the Pacific, where he decided just to stop eating for three weeks so he wouldn't have to throw up any more (which was a shame because he was sleeping in a hammock on the beach where the shrimp boats brought in their harvest every morning as the sun was breaking, DAMN); and there's Morelia, where he threw up in the bus; and there's Guadalajara, where he ate those damned strawberries in the first place and finished himself off by drinking that cola with ice; and there's also Tula, the marvelous archeological zone north of Mexico City where they have vertical stelae reminiscent of Stonehenge, if Stonehenge smelled like corn tortillas; and also glorious Guanajuato, which at night looks like a painting by Vega, and Plot is pretty sure he didn't throw up in either of those two towns, though he can't be sure. What a great trip.