Day Zero, Mon 01/20/25
Guadalajara (or as we say, “Guad”) was the halfway point between our house and Guanajuato, so we spent the first night of our journey here. Drove to the Centro but could not locate our hotel in the middle of the night, and the only humans answering the phone worked remotely in Reservations and couldn’t help us. We gave up and found another dog-friendly hotel in the area: El Palpatio, which was a lovely historic hotel that used to be a convent. The employees could not have been more friendly and helpful; such a relief after the stressful night we’d had. Total coincidence: my sister booked the same hotel the next weekend!
Day One, Tue 01/21/25
In the morning we walked the dogs in a nearby park, Parque Morelos. There were many monuments to Mexican heroes, some which I actually remembered reading about. This trip ended up being a walk through history, so in the captions I’ll give some details so you understand what you’re looking at. The short version is: Guanajuato state is where the first Mexican Revolution of 1811 began. It started with the famous grito (shouting) on September 16 in the town of Dolores, when Father Hidalgo got the townspeople excited about overthrowing the Spanish. They became the insurgents, and took over Dolores, then the next day they captured the nearby town of San Miguel de Grande (later renamed San Miguel de Allende after one of the other Revolution heroes). Then they marched to Guanajuato city, set the granary on fire, and massacred all the Spanish nobles. That started a series of events and battles that finally ended in 1821 when Mexico signed its Declaration of Independence.
My sister and her crew were actually travelling the road to Guanajuato from San Miguel de Allende, but Lurko and I were coming from Guadalajara in the west. The trip was fairly uneventful, other than there were not a lot of food opportunities and by the time we arrived to Guanajuato I was HANGRY. The only place we could find was Carl’s Junior, and GOD FORBID we eat at an evil American fast food place on our Mexican vacation. But nothing else was open, so we went there and I sulked until the food came. Then I ate … and got over it.
Other stuff that happened that day…we got settled into our cute AirBnb. Then we fed and walked the dogs by the Frog Fountain (Fuente de Las Ranas), which was a public fountain with about 15 different frog sculptures in the surrounding plaza. The name Guanajuato is actually a Spanish-ized form of the native Purépecha phrase Quanaxhuato, or “place of the frogs.”
Then we met DeeDee, her husband Brad, and their friend Doug in front of the Basilica, a really pretty old church, and spent the rest of the evening eating and drinking and wandering around the streets of Guanajuato. The entire city is a historical monument, so most of the cars are underground and you really can’t get into too much trouble here. The photos speak for themselves.
Part 2 coming soon!
