We came for the weather, but San Miguel conquered us because of what we didn’t hear.

Why San Miguel?

When friends ask Rebecca and me about our January in Mexico, we start with the weather. At 72 and 74, we finally decided to become snowbirds for the coldest month in Iowa, where we live. Iowa’s weather pushed us away.

San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, promised an average daytime temperature of 73 degrees Fahrenheit. I took the first photo at 4:17 pm in shirt sleeves on January 3rd from a balcony outside our bedroom. San Miguel fulfilled its weather promise. This turned out to be a typical day.*

Around this time last year, as we were considering warm-weather options, friends Peter and Mary highly recommended San Miguel, which they had visited yearly. While their stories helped seal the deal, we mostly wanted respite from frigid Iowa.

Throughout 2023, Rebecca polished her Spanish daily on Duolingo. I intermittently thumbed Moon’s San Miguel travel guide. When family and friends heard where we were going, they asked if it would be dangerous and what we would do there.

Moon’s excellent guidebook confirmed what Peter and Mary had told us about San Miguel’s safety. Plus, we knew 10,000 American and Canadian ex-pats lived in this community. Throughout our month, we never felt threatened.

We never had a good answer about what we would do in San Miguel. Rebecca said she would use her Spanish. I added what I could remember from Moon’s section on The Best of San Miguel. The weather was our default.

We could have said, “We would let San Miguel work its magic on us.”

We didn’t.

But San Miguel did.

It seeped into our pores.

Quietly.

And that’s why we’re returning.

No Honking

I took the first photo from our apartment’s 3rd-floor balcony, which you can see in the image below. We spent hours on that veranda, especially late afternoon, with gin and tonics.

Across Aldama Street was Parque Juárez, a popular park. Sounds from the park included the giggle of children in a playground, the thump-thump from a basketball court, and, on Fridays, the romping rhythms of a Mariachi band playing the Sea Snake Dance at a wedding reception.

And, constantly, in the background, the heavy rumble of cars on Aldama’s cobblestone pavement. You can see the stone covering in the lower left corner of the photo.

What we never heard, not once, was a honk.

On January 31, our last day, we were picked up by a van shuttle service to take us to the Guanajuato International Airport in Leon, about an hour away. Ten minutes into the airport journey, traffic slowed to a crawl on the two-lane highway. All the four passengers in the van could see was a long line of slow-moving cars in front of us. Our driver didn’t seem concerned since we had plenty of time to catch our flights.

After twenty minutes, we passed through a town, crossed a highway intersection, and our van began to speed up. Now, on our right, down the other highway, we could see what had slowed us down — tens of bicyclists following a pickup truck with a religious icon sitting on a pedestal.

It was a pilgrimage.

And along that slow-moving way,

Not a single honk.

Not one.

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*Drought is a severe problem in central Mexico. You can read about it here.