Cable car

The Cable car in Singapore goes over to an entertainment complex in the harbour.It is a great ride and a pretty good bargain. We went on it twice, and this last time in a glass bottomed car. My stomach was in my throat the whole time. The large building in the bottom photo is the mid way point.

The first little blue pill

In little India. Check out the size of this add. There is a guy walking on the street beside it. I won't say another thing.

Requsite Python Pose

It seems like everywhere you go in Singapore there is a guy with a snake and a hat. Well we deffinatelly wanted to be a part of that action!! August was super gung ho at first and then a bit overwhelmed on how heavey the snake was..I guess he had just eaten his last client, so i could understand his concern! Anyway, i like this photo best since you can see how the creature is winding himself around August' leg. We had to use three men to pull it off!

The Singapore Zoo!

The Singapore Zoo is deffinatelly the best zoo that i have ever been to. That being said i have never been to the San Diego Zoo, which is supposed to be pretty dang good too.

What i loved about this zoo was that it was totally shady (and Singpore is HOT!) everywhere we went. And at every area there were LOTS of animals that you could see up close and very presonal i forgot to post the photo of the fruit bats, but we could see every detail of those guys (!) chomping away on thier papaya.

August actually had a lemur walk by him on a branch and brush him with it's tail. Very cool. We were greeted at the entrance by this big black ape hanging on a branch. Every were we went it was feeding time and the animals were out and about. The Bengal white tigers were awsome! And their enclosure looked pretty good from may perspective, not being a tiger and all. In my mind they were the most wonderful of all. Of course there were elephants and giraffes galore and lots more. A good time was had by all!

Nematodes!

Yes we are in HK now, but i haven't gotten a chance to post the rest of the photos from Ingpore, so bear with me!

Have you ever seen the Sponge Bob epasode about the Nematodes? well these things at the Singapore Aquarium look just like em! They ate Sponge Bobs pineaple in like 3 seconds! Funnily enough the SA thought that they were "Sea Worms" Who has ever heard of that!

Underwater world

Well the title really says it all. We went to UWW and it was great!! Lots of fish you can touch and plenty of shade and AC!

Shoot i have other photos but i can't get them uploaded! We have been tearing around Singapore like....well TOURISTS! It has been great. We have seen the Zoo (best ever) been on a boat in the harbour, done lots of eating and shopping, gone on a cable car....TWICE! and a LOUGE...twice. Imagine. I went to a lovely Modern dance preformance on Saturday, la la la Human Steps. From Canada no less.

We are off to Hong Kong Tomorrow!! The time has flown by. Damn! But i hope to get the photo scenario sorted there! See you in......

Photos

I can't figure out how to post more than one photo per entry that looks the way i want it, so here are a couple of shots higglely piggely.  The one one below is another one from the Botanical Gardens, feeding the fish. Evita totally stole this little kids fish food, luckily Singaporeans think she is cute and took lots of photos of her.

The one on the right is from Alison's living room. Check out her neighbors!  Singapore is definitely all about apartment living.  More later!

Singapore!!

Well after a can we say, a looooonnnnnggggg flight, 14 hours from LA to Hong Kong, waiting on the tarmac for a couple of hours, weather delay, then another 3 to Singapore we arrived at 2:30 am on Saturday morning. (having left at 1 pm on Thursday afternoon...you figure it out!!) 

Of course we leaped out of bed the next day and bounced around the immediate proximity of my friend Alison's house. Our first stop after lunch was the Singapore Botanical Gardens. It was lovely! We think Mexico is lush, this place has got us beat hands down. Every tree is HUGE and covered with ferns and other interesting bearded growths. Those plants in the photo in the foreground are similar to these elephant ear plants that i just can't get to grow at Eden. Well these look awesome!! 

 We fed gold fish and turtles and Evita made friends with lots of small children and babies. It was great. We love Singapore!

Everybody hates a tope!

And Jim is no exception! It was poring down cats and dogs today and our tope to the north, the one right past our service entrance showed us it's alternative pourpose! To block the water from going down to the natural beach outlet at Monteverde and to allow it to puddle up and come in our back gate! Well that was not going to happen on Jim's watch, he went out there and destroyed it pick and tiny shovel! It worked. The water is flowing smoothly down the street and we are high and dry, just the way we like it!

It was good to get a soaking rain. We are leaving tomorrow and felt like it just wasnt summer time with out some mud between our toes! Yea, squish squish! We have hopefully gotten all of our ducks in a row. Every body paid up and happy. We went to Patzcuaro last weekend and ordererd new colmns for the entrance and a fountain for the entrance area too. Eeek, it should be done by the time we get back. How exciting!

The shop in Zihua will be open all summer so if any of you dear readers are in the neighbourhood please stop by and give saludos to Karina, Diana or Sandra, they will be holding down the fort.

I will be writing next from......

The sign is starting to look a little worn but it still gives us that warm fuzzy feeling that we are nessled in our cacoon for the summer. Kind of like being snowed in at a ski lodge but with out the snow, or fireplaces, and with a beach. It's great! WE LOVE our guests don't get me wrong, but...well i am sure you understand...it's VACATION!!!But we still have to work. We are re-roofing bungalow 8 and bungalow 9. We will be putting new columns on the reception area. Maybe you noticed the scary looking mold on them this season. Well turns out those solid looking huge beams are rotton to the core. Oh well, it gives us a reason to go to PATZCUARO! Yeah.


We will go up this weekend (we can since we are cloooossseeedd) and order some new columns, and also hopefully a new fountain type thing that will go on a new wall that we are putting in the parking lot to block car lights from shining into suite 3. That is the idea anyway. Mariana will be incharge of these projects since we will be zooming around Asia!! Yeah that is where the vacation thing kicks in!

We will leave here on the we will leave on the 12th of June and get to Singapore on the 13th! Whew that is a long trip!! I am buying an extended battery for the DVD player and lots of presents for bribing unhappy children! The only thing that will be getting us through the 16 hour plane flight is the fact that once we get there we are there for 2 months! Wooohhooo. Jim will be answering e-mail in the usual Jim like way (if you know what i mean) but never fear if you don't hear from him, he will catch up when we get back.

I am hoping to post more since we will be doing stuff that is possibly INTERESTING. YEA! So we will be in touch! Have a good summer!

Come on down!

My travel agent wrote me and said.....

From/to LAX
240.84 roundtrip INCLUDING the tax.
Its currently good for travel up to a year from now.
There are certain black out dates where it goes up by 30.00 each way.
This is a darn good deal! So don't say I didn't tell you!

Welcome Fruity Keiko in ZIhuatanejo

Well, if you have ever been strolling along the streets of Zihua, thinking why am i here, and really there is NOTHING better than the shop at Hacienda Eden, stroll no further than number 5a Vincente Guerrero!


I have opened a branch of Fruity Keiko in Zihuatanejo. It is in the location that used to house Coco Cabana, the shop that was a part of Coconuts Restaurant. Not that i am trying to urge our guests to leave paradise or anything , but rather to be able to have an office that stays open all year. That way we can shop and do things in the summer that before we could do only in the month of October, which can get a little stressful let me tell you! Our grand opening was on the first of October and seemed to be a (am i allowed to say this and still stay humble?) success! Yeah! It has been a great experience getting to know the folks in Zihua better. 100% positive!
For anyone worrying, i carry almost all of the same things in either store. But i think that there are lots of people in Zihua that never come to Troncones so hopefully it will work out. I will let you know next year. In the mean time, here is another photo, stop by and see us the next time you are in Town!





The night of the inauguration, Christian did some lovely snacks, Esperanza, and her new assistants Diana and Karina took charge of all the details and the rest of us enjoyed a lovely champagne toast!

I like butterflys better than mold

Hello,

Here we are in the middle of the rainyiest of the rainy seasons. Wow, it rained almost every day in August and still going strong for September. Although lots of storms have gone by none so far has done any damage besides the obvious disaster of the road. I don't even want to go into it!! And the Mold! Woah!!

Of course there are lots of benifits to the rain. One is the plants go over the top, literally, the bougamvilla on both sides of the hotel are over the roof. I can't imagine how many gardeners we would have to have if the hotel were open in the summer just to keep up with it all. No dust is another big benifit, jeez i hate that stuff! And the animal and bug life is constantly entertaining. Many of you know that the kitchen at our house is outside. Ideal for the tropics where it never gets cold, but at night with the lights attracting every bug from miles around it's like cooking in the Amazon, massive beetles, mantisis, moths the size of my hand, all flying around my head at the same time! Yikes! Very interesting. August of course loves it and has a new "friend" everyday.

Some of the more pictuesque additions are the millions of butterflys like the one above. This one in in the flowers infront of the restaurant. I tried to take a long shot cuz there were sooooo many but they just blended in (as they are supposed to do no doubt). There are stripey ones, grean and black Monarch look alikes, orange, yellow, solid white huge ones and ones that "snap" when they flap thier wings. I got to look that one up! So all in all everything is going well.

We will start preparing the hotel to open next week, no big changes this summer. Will write more later,

Welcome to the new and improved edenmex!

The product of many months toil by our web designer Paul Sims. Thank you Paull!

We hope that all of our faithfull guests past, present and future will find the site a breath of fresh air. Jeez, that salmon pink was getting to be too much!! Any comments about the website just send to

I am sure one can easily find lots of mistakes on this new site. The last week i have been on the "lets just get it up and running" mode and will hopefully be able to fine tune things as we go along. So bear with me!

One of our biggest changes is not a visual one. We have added an extra e-mail address for communicating with us. One address:haciendaeden@gmail.com is for general questions, comments and requests, and our old e-mail, evaandjim@aol.com will be relegated for reservation requests only. We hope that will help to cut Jim's work load a bit and to allow us to pick up the speed on the response time.

Our past guests will notice that we have at last ALL NEW PHOTOS! Thanks to Willie McElligott for so many wonderful shots. For the most part they were all taken in December 2006 and January 2007. So what you see is what you get at this point. The site is technically very easy to update. So the theory is that i should be able to keep the photos more current. I want to add more personal photos and people photos in general, but i havent decided to make a section for that or just keep it on the blog.

Speaking of the blog, i realize that at this point i can't support comments and i have no idea how we are going to to the archives. So we will have to see how that pans out. For the moment i just wanted to wish everyone a very warm hello and smooches all around!

Regards,

Eva Myrth

Belated Happy Halloween!

Hello Hello! We are up and running. We did our traditional Day of the dead altar for our opening night. I will post Photos when Kathy Green gets back home, as the batteries on my camera were low that night.

We have enjoyed, a Jeremy and Jennifer's wedding, Halloween, Day of the dead, an opening party, August's birthday, another wedding last night and just general mahem since i last wrote. Not to mention unpresedented rain in November (yikes, will the parking lot ever dry out?)!
None of this could be possible without our loyal staff.

Thank you Esperanza, Pedro, Haley, Esveidi, "the Ladies", the ever zenlike, Don Tino, "Chompy", and sweet as pie Samuel (aka the snake catcher) .

We are looking forward to a fun season, and if the first 12 days are anything to go by it will be GREAT! 

For Real

Even though i have spent many years in places with seasons, every winter, i find it hard to imagine that other places are getting cold and people are snuggling into thier blankets while we are still boiling away. I bet it is the same for those of you watching the fall leaves come down, how can it not possibly be at least chilly all over the world?
We know what we experience (today!) . And well everything else, is well, something else. I enjoy living here in Mexico because i am always confronted with things, people, events outside of my past experience. It makes me feel alive, and challanged, and sometimes sad. I guess that is true everywhere. Sunset out infront of Eden a few nights ago. 

Wavey Bay

Well as you all know i'm not much for surfing, or any sport for that matter. But I got to tell ya' today is a perfect day for paddling out. It is cloudy so you could stay out all day without getting too crispy, the water is super warm, the waves are huge! I took this photo about 15 minutes ago and didn't even take time for particularly big set to come in. There is no one else out there either. To all of our surfer guests. Wish you were here! 

Buying Trip, Yeee Ha!

Last week my Mom was here and we went on a shop buying trip. It was great. We found lot of new things. In the photo we are at a candel factory that is simply amazing! No scented candels here! Some of them you might be able to make out in the back ground are massive, 6 and 8 wicks and need a dolly to move them around. We didn´t get any of those but others that were just as cool.

Esperanza has a nose for findning those imposible to find work shops of obscure artists. Many of them are represented by wholesalers who want to keep thier where abouts secret so that they can charge one arm and one leg to the rest of us. Consequently we make it our business to root them out! She has embarked on another trip to the south of Mexico for more of the same. She is hoping to get as far as Merida which is known to have the best hats in Mexico and also some of the most famous suppliers of the typical Mexican Guyabera, or typical shirt for men, with the pockets and embroidery on the front.

We have two more trips planned before the hotel opens. Fun Fun Fun! 

Kathy Green turns me on!

Kathy Green, loyal guest and avid reader, (among other wonderful things), has turned me on to the following post about the Ag industry in the US. I am currently reading Collapse by Jarrod Diamond which also focuses on the destruction that us humans can do to this fragile world we live on. It is truly depressing. Vote these people out of office!

Read it at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/ceo-president_b_27658.html

Here is also a great site covering some close house and senate races. http://www.actblue.com/page/netrootscandidates.

Wet but not wild

I know that you are all waiting to hear the latest from down here in tree falling down, lighting striking and bungalow flooding zone now that himicane Juan is done with us. Well nothing happened! It rained alllllllllllllll day yesterday and the sky was an even slate color. Jim did a stint of canal digging to divert water from our parking lot which has a tendancy to fill up and then send water into the shop. It worked, and no water got in.

August got a ¨snow day¨ at school, which we didn´t know about till we got there...Yeah, we are out of the loop!

As you can see the roads are pretty puddly and this is just the closest one to us. But nothing dramatic. All is well! 

Politics

Once again my favorite blogger gives us something to think about.

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Who decides what the U.S. will do about Iraq and Iran?

August moves up in the world

Well after about a year of waiting ( Mexico makes us veeerrry patient) August has finally got his bunk bed. It is soooo high that i get dizzy and a bit sea sick when i am up there. Not that is sways i think that i just imagine that it is! Anywho, Don Salva our carpenter did a great job, and it was well worth the wait. 

Lucky!

It has been raining steadily this August. A good thing compared to past summers where there was nothing but sweltering heat! But with the rain comes lightning and thunder.

Last Thursday there was a big storm and at about 3 am the electricity went out. (I was out of town but Jim recounts) that he got up to turn off the battery back up for the computer, and was standing in the kitchen watching it pour down when a HUGE lighting and simultaneous gigantic CRACK scared everyone silly. Apparently Estrella did a back flip and hit the wall about 3 feet up! The damage wasn't assessed until the next morning. BOOM cannon file off the starboard bow! The top of the arch as you see exploded there are bricks and cement everywhere. A bunch of tiles were broken. (not to mention various wireless phones and modems that now are kaput!) But other than that. WHEW! I glad that wasn't me! I don't remember if I posted last year, but we lost two palm trees in October to lightning. What is it with our place. Why now? Needless to say we are going to install a lightning rod.

Extra Extra Read All About It!!

We have been blessed by Conde Nast, who have written a wonderful article about the pacific coast of Mexico in the August issue of thier Traveler magazine. Find it at http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/detail?articleId=10385. It is a nice article and we are flattered to report a nice photo of yours truly. Of course i could go ON AND ON but i won´t . Check it out your selves.

The road more traveled

Many of you might recognize this photo from our website. It is what the road to the bay looked like back in 1996 when we first came here. It doesn't show the HUGE puddles and the slippery mud that claimed our truck a few times on our first pass. Quite a learning expereience. When you hit mud go slow but above all keep going! If not call the tractor to come and get you.

Well the gossip on the beach is that the county seat is going to pave the road. Eeek! It will be a massive change, for the better and worse. I am really tired of the dust and i am sure that the locals that have to walk to work on the road are too. I also wouldn't mind driving to Troncones in a few minutes rather than 10 bumpy ones. It gets old pretty fast.

There will also be lots of negative effects from having a flat and unencombered surface to navigate. People will drive much too fast! A few years ago when the road was grated really well and all of the speed bumps were taken out, there were two accidents in the first 24 hours. Luckly no one was badly hurt. I am sure that won't be the case with asphalt. Pro, con, pro, con.

In the end neither matter. Either they will do it or not, and we will have to manage the outcome. I am for putting big sloping speed bumps all over it, so even though it will still take a while to get to town at least it will be a smooth ride. 

We are back!

Wow! A fun filled and interesting vacation was had by all!! It was GREAT! This photo is from the roof top sculpture garden at the Met. All of the items that are stuck in the alligator were taken from passangers in the security of airports, so there are lots of pocket knives and nail files (now we have to add to that suntan lotion and other liquid matter i suppose) We didn't know what it ment really but you can't beat the view!

We loved New York best of all. What a fun city! Everyone was so nice and friendly and man there are plenty of distractions. We are sold and are trying to figure out a way to go every summer.
Of course the rest of the vacation rocked as well.

We visited my brother and family in San Antonio and my Inlaws in Orlando, yes we went to the Dixie stampeed. I can't believe that i actually did that! Especially since the whole dooo dah was born right in my back yard in Pigion Forge Tennessee. Dolly Parton must be raking it in. We had fun though so they have obviously got thier finger on the pulse of what it is that entertains children. Horses jumping through flaming rings i think!

We also spend a month of real down time in Oak RIdge, visiting my parents. It is a lovely place, and if you took away the ocean, oh yea, the palm trees, it would be a lot like our back yard here in Mexico.

We arrived back to most things in order. The garden is out of control as usual, and everything is molding, but hey, what's new in the summer time in the tropics? We also have been rife with computer problems. It always happens after we have been gone for a while. So we need to fix the computers (yes both of them) before i can download the photos to take more! Yikes!

All in good time, or should i say...Mexican time! Adios! 

Happy Birthday Eva Lilia!

Well this has got to go down in the Garrity-Robbins history as one of the most glamerous birthdays ever. Eva Lilia got to spend her first birthday in a lovely apartment in NYC over looking the Bowery Church, fetted by wonderful people, champagne and baloons! Yea!

Merceds brought the wonderful choclate mousse cake and Sydney and Michael the over the top local. Thank you to all!

Our favorite lawyer gets hitched!

Congratulations to David and Maura who tied the knot a couple of weeks ago at the famous church in La Union. It was a beautiful ceremony. An not hot at all (one of my worries) there was a fresh breeze blowing the whole time and everyone looked magnificent! The party at David´s place here on Manzanillo bay was the talk of the town, with lots of guests flying in for the festivities.