M

Madera, at 2,000+ meters, is a fairly typical high mountain valley town in Mexico. When we first got there, we didn't know that, it was our first such visit, but we were immediately charmed by the wooden sidewalks and the unpaved streets. With the addition of a few wooden porches to the buildings, we could easily have shot a wild west movie here. Only three or four blocks wide and no more than two miles long, only the two main streets were paved.

Madera

A small town, it is the center of a rich farming area, and maybe a getaway destination for Mexicans escaping the heat of the lower desert areas. It is also, of course, the jumping off point for visits to several tourist sites, only one of which, Cuarenta Casas , we managed to see. The reason for that is that getting to some sites required driving over very rough dirt roads, for which our little Ford Escort was singularly poorly equipped. We have often thought we should have bought a pickup rather than a small passenger sedan, but we were uneducated about Mexico's roads and did the best we could with the information and budget we had available.

The town has a tourist office, a couple of gas stations, and a decent restaurant, Los Lobos Cafeteria, where Jan even found Raisin Bran and decaf coffee for her breakfast pleasure. Here also we encountered one of many lessons in "Mexican time". On the day we left, we planned on eating breakfast there but the owner, for some unknown reason, failed to show up at opening time (7:30 a.m.) leaving the waitresses and the customers (us) on the sidewalk waiting. Gerry's patience ran out before he got there.