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We put on a lot of weight in McAllen. But wait (hee-hee) — let's first tell how we got there and what we did.

As we travelled south through the Pacific side of Mexico our electronics got less and less reliable. We were carrying two portable computers - a new Fujitsu bought in New York City and a Fosa we had bought in May, 2000 in Hong Kong. The Fosa began to not always boot properly. That had become Jan's machine and she wasn't too happy with the situation. Almost at the same time, June, 2000, we had bought a digital camera for Gerry. It had gone from not focusing reliably to not focusing. As long as he wanted to take pictures of things 20 inches away all was fine.

In Mexico we searched for replacements. Funnily enough, at big sea-side tourist resorts such as Puerto Vallarta the selection was very poor. In New York City, London, and Hong Kong, as well as many smaller places there are plenty of people who want to take the tourist dollar. But it wasn't so here.

The best selection we found was in Mexican Wal-Marts. But the offerings were still pretty poor and the prices pretty high by comparison to USA prices. So, as we worked our way north from the coast to Guadalajara to Zacatechas, we decided to go several hundred miles further north, to McAllen, Texas, and see what we could find there.

Alamo Motel, McAllen. Home for a month.

McAllen turned out to be the place where Mexican's go to do their shopping. Why it is that all of the shopping centers, etc are on the American side of the border we don't know. But they are. McAllen and the surrounding communities of Pharr, Mission, Edinburg, etc are home to many Mexican immigrants. In most stores, gasoline stations, and at check-out counters Spanish is more helpful than English. We quickly found that out when we tried to get directions to a Denny's on our arrival; we wanted to eat a late breakfast there. (There are two Denny's but it took us a week to find them.)

Service Area, Hong Kong Buffet, McAllen.

And so are the restaurants. We found plenty of places where you could "eat all you want" for $5, and even less. In fact, our favourite, cost $4.50 for fantastic Chinese food. We truly bulked up there.

Gerry holding Sony-PC330E package.

Most of our time in McAllen was spent researching and buying our new toys. Most days we would be in the motel room or at the pool until noon and then go out for lunch and shopping. In the room we had unlimited access to internet via our AOL account and the free local calls of the motel. We did email almost every day and sometimes three and four times a day.

In our first week we managed to find the camera Gerry wanted. But that was over the web. Through Moshe's good help, we bought it in NYC and had it shipped to McAllen. In our second week we found a terrific Acer laptop in a Best Buy store about 50 miles from McAllen, in Brownsville. A few days later in McAllen we found that the Best Buy was giving rebates on the same machine and that we were elibible for a further $250 reduction in price — which we eventually got, after mailing in the forms.

After two weeks in McAllen we decided to settle down and work on some backlog computer items. We had been working on Gerry's family tree, the descendants of the Stotlands. It took more than a week but we — mostly Gerry — sorted things, made 33 CDs, and mailed them to various family members.

Texas World War II Memorial, Mission, Texas

Three or four times we made a touristy outing. At the end of the first week we went to Brownsville to check out more stores there. After finding Jan's Acer laptop we went on to the beach in Padre Island (a sand bar much like New Jersey's coast) and liked it. We briefly considered taking a motel there for a week but decided it was too isolated for good shopping. We went to the Texas WWII Memorial in Mission (a few miles west of McAllen), a place just opened and still not finished. And we went to the Veterans Day celebrations in Edinburg (north-east of McAllen). There most of the participants were obviously of Mexican ancestry (by appearance and accent) but all was done in English.