I am back!

Such long absence won’t happen again, I promise.

Partial reason for it was the moving. I left Spain and Barcelona in the beginning of December. Moving countries is not a joke. From closing accounts to finding the right moving company. And combine that with my weird desire to leave everything for the very last moment possible. Every time I have to do something with a big impact, I decide to challenge my limits and see if I can do it for 1/20 of the time required for no apparent reason. Maybe it's the adrenaline rush and overconfidence. I do try to change this, but the fact that I always succeed is not motivating enough to do things differently.

Whether I will miss Barcelona, the answer is no. My skin is very thick at this point. I’ve been on the move for the last 10 years and I have built this quality to enjoy a place to the fullest while I’m still there, so when the time comes, I can close the chapter and move on.

The other reason was a 1 month trip to Mexico. Yes, 1 month. Which at the time of the booking process sounded just about right, but I have to be honest here, it was too long and we started seeing the bad sides of everything. So another lesson here - no more than 2 weeks vacation at a time. Mexico is very beautiful and a must if you haven't been there. Don’t fall for the propaganda and the scaremongering of the western media. Yes, they have their own issues, but which country doesn’t? “Don’t judge a book by its cover” comes to mind.

We traveled within Mexico and one of our flights from Mexico City to Cancun got delayed and then cancelled. Then the next one got cancelled too and my boyfriend and I decided to drive to Cancun. From Mexico City. It was already approaching midnight. Instead of going to a hotel and sleep and catch the flight the next day - like normal people do, we decided to do a “Cannonball” - style drive. We rented a sedan from the VW group (The cars in Mexico are 90% built in China specifically for the Mexican market. They look like models from car manufacturers’ lineup, but they’re not the same. And they're sooo underpowered.). We bought water and food and we started the journey in the middle on the night. The idea was to switch every 3 hours with the other person sleeping in the meantime. Guess what? None of us was able to fall asleep and during the first shift this caused some anxiety that we might not be able to finish the trip as fast as we planned because of that, but this quickly disappeared and we realised this will become once in a lifetime story. During the night, the highways were full of trucks (like in any other part of the world) and we spent most of the time in the left lane driving with 70-80km/h above the speed limit for the highway, which was 110km/h. 180km/h was also the limit of the VW sedan, in sport mode. We could have driven even faster with the right car, but this was already an unsafe speed for a Mexican version of a VW sedan built in China. Here probably come your questions - did you get a fine and did you get stopped by the police. A speed camera did take a photo, but only once and the police cars in Mexico are Dodge Charger with very distinctive features and easy to spot, so you can guess we slammed the brakes every time we saw one in the distance. We are yet to receive the ticket from the rental company, so at the time of writing I have no idea how much that would be. I will update you once we get it.

And a few hours later we were in Cancun just in time for the hotel’s check-in. For the record the whole trip is 1666 km. When we rented the sedan, it had only 150km on it. We were proud of our time, but we both knew in the perfect world, with the perfect car (looking at you, AMG S63, which will continue to receive testimonial mentions in this blog, because it is the best car Mercedes has built and just like the SLR it deserves more attention), with some preparation and radar detectors, we could beat it with a few hours to spare. The flight that we were supposed to be on arrived 5 hours after us (delayed, again). Not only now we have a once in a lifetime story and we got the chance to know sides of us that could only shine in demanding situations like this one, we also overtook the flight. Pretty cool.

In other words, I’m back and cool things and big news are coming. Happy 2022!