Viejo Vallarta

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Last night I watched several gray-haired grandmotherly types ride a donkey onto the dance floor of a packed bar. Flashing lights and music from the early 60´s pumping, folks dancing and whoopin. But I was wondering where they kept the defibrillators. It was a scene from an Annette Funicello beach party movie slow forwarded 50 years with all the actors in place, fresh out of their last retirement seminar and all the boys with jumbo prescriptions of Viagra in their pocket... Go Daddy Go!!!

Down a couple blocks I passed the Canucks Bar... everyone staring at the big screen TV watching, yup, you guessed it, hockey.

Over at the dock that afternoon I´d watched a local throw netter pull up a pelican, with terns and motor boats diving and weaving between bathers.

Sunset time four guys threw themselves off a eighty foot pole with just a little rope around their waists, a while later they did it again.

We had tiramisu flavored gelato on the boardwalk during the heat of the afternoon and enchiladas in the evening sitting in plastic chairs on the sandy beach entertained by a three-legged dog and a yellow-crowned night heron. Fireworks went off in the distance and the dinner cruise pirate ship made a slow sojourn out and back, colored lights a-blazing.

The boardwalk sculptures, from the real life to the surreal are very cool. The measure of a good boardwalk sculpture is the extent to which it generates spontaneous interaction, and there are some great ones.

And oh, yeah, the church. Dress codes have changed a bit since I last attended, but not enough to get me through the door.

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