Although I don’t leave for another five days, I’m getting to that point in the trip where everything starts accelerating–pretty much all my reservations are arranged for the remaining nights, and my list of things to do is very small and manageable. At this point, I try to stop talking to too many people or reading too many things, lest I find out about something way back on the road that I can’t possibly visit, and will be filled with regret about until I come back.

I guess I was subconsciously overcompensating for this back when I planned the trip, because I failed to double-check the book synopsis I had written, in which I doled out the chapters between me and my co-writer, who’s doing precisely one-quarter of the book. I had it in my head that he was doing two chapters, and I’m doing all the others. So good thing I checked my email here in Campeche a few days ago and saw a note from him, referring to a chapter I thought _I_ was writing. Turns out I was completely confused, and there’s this whole chunk of the western gulf coast that isn’t my beat at all! So I’m off the hook, work-wise, but now I hardly know what to do with myself. My mom and I still drove all over the damn place for the last couple of days, and for some reason I can’t help but poke my head in promising hotels, or scribble cryptic notes in my notebook. Tomorrow I had back to what really is my territory, Mérida, and then I think I can relax a little more.

Now I’m too dazed from driving that I can’t think of anything I’ve done recently. Having my mother in the car does help pass the time, but I no longer have hours in which to compose clever blog entries in my head, or practice compound verb tenses in Spanish. We have been eating exceptionally well: lunch at La Pigua (or really, its new guise, Sir Francis Drink…oh har de har) in Campeche, a very famous place where we happened to end up sharing our table with two ladies of a certain age who promptly ordered beers and started bossing the waiter around. They were very impressed with my mother, and kept complimenting her on how young she looked–perhaps because her hair isn’t dyed yellow-blond, and she doesn’t have a raspy cigarrette voice…”Qué linda! Qué chchchcooooobbbeeen!” they swooned. I ate my shark-stuffed, batter-fried hot chiles in tomato sauce and wondered if it wasn’t just that I looked particularly old?

Also, dinner last night at a nifty hacienda where only one tiny toothless man was acting as the night guard, and a sweet Mayan woman was the hostess. A phantom-like owner-I-guess appeared once (I imagined he was from no-longer-so-wealthy stock, now renting out the grand house as a hotel to stay afloat), and we ate the most essentially chickeny chicken under looming oil paintings of Christ dining in a taverna, and a kid peeling shrimp. Another formal dining room held more enormous, cryptic paintings in the Dutch genre style, but weirdly sinister scenarious. When we woke up this morning, everything seemed a lot more normal, but still pretty great, especially when we saw all the baby goats and the big vegetable garden.

Tomorrow we go to the Yucatán state fair–can’t wait to try the local equivalent of funnel cake! Oh wait, I guess that’s churros…well, corn dogs, then?