Hello Friends,
I hope my American friends had a wonderful Thanksgiving…or at least survived it; I know the holidays can be difficult for so many reasons. I’m grateful for my chosen family—my dear friends—who I spent a lovely evening with. I’m still stuffed!
We just got home from our 7-week road trip a few days ago, and while I love to travel, I’m also thankful to be home (with a shower and toilet). On the last part of our van trip, we headed down to Baja, and while there, we encountered the most generous, kind-hearted people. One of the torque arms on our van’s 4 x 4 system broke, and we had plans to set out on a long, bumpy dirt road to Guadalupe Canyon (if you haven’t been there, it’s an amazing oasis in the desert with natural hot springs). If we didn’t get the van fixed and the torque arm came off completely (which it surely would have done on that insane rocky road), we would be stranded without any cell coverage. So we drove around Tecate, looking for a mechanic who could weld the part back together (knowing the Spanish word for weld came in handy). We stopped to ask a man on the street if he knew of a mechanic nearby. He told us to wait a minute, looked for a phone number in his wallet, opened his flip phone, and made a call. He then told us to follow him in his car.
We weaved through Tecate’s narrow streets, following this stranger, and arrived at his friend’s house. After I explained the problem in my broken Spanish, the friend’s grown son wore a red Thing 1 hoodie and crawled under the van to have a look. He then asked us if 30 US dollars was okay, and we agreed that it was. I have no idea how much that welding job would cost here in the United States, but I’m guessing it would be a lot more. We thanked the man who brought us there and said our good-byes. An hour later, we were back on the road. I’m grateful for the kindness of strangers and hope I can keep this in mind when tourists visiting my town are in need of help.
For this last prompt in November, we’re going to take a survey of gratitude,