Cumpleaños con Camarones Limpias

Yelapa is a little town on the Bay of Banderas, about forty minutes by boat from Puerto Vallarta. And in fact, you have to go by boat -- there are no roads that reach it. We recently spent a week there, enjoying a life free of cars, phones, e-mail, news, clocks, and (for the most part) shoes.

There's a little crescent beach with a murky lagoon behind it. At one end of the beach there's a hotel and a cluster of restaurants, where you can sit under an umbrella and drink margaritas and watch the parasailers wheel around the cove while people wander by and try to sell you jewelry, t-shirts, and meringue pies. At the other end of the beach a stack of beach houses climbs up the hill toward town.

The town itself has steep winding cobbled pathways between the buildings, with little plazas and bridges and staircases and archways, and hibiscus and bougainvillea growing all over the place. There are burros hauling bricks through the streets, a big tree full of chickens across from the grocery store, half-finished buildings with rebar sticking up where the next storey will be someday, kids playing soccer in the plaza, and dogs lying in the shade. Water taxis ferry people from one end of town to the other, or out to the Mariettas Islands, or to Playa de los Muertos (we were told that ruthless pirates once ruled the Bahia de Banderas, and this was the place they took their victims), or back to Puerto Vallarta.

In the last thirty years a little colony of American hippies established themselves here too, which may account for the little eco-murals and other artsy touches everywhere. As a vacation spot it was hard to beat: the sun shone warm and bright all week; there was plenty of interesting stuff to do, and we got by pretty easily with Mikala's twenty-year-old high school Spanish, Josie's first semester vocabulary, and Andrew's inspired bursts of Italian. (Once Simon figured out how to say "quiero leche, por favor," he was all set.)

On our very first day in town, we noticed this intriguing sign nailed up on a wall along the path to the beach:


Something about it caught our eye -- the jaunty angle, perhaps, or possibly the bottle imprints on the cardboard. Or maybe the mysterious, gratuitous gratitude. A few days later we saw this one (second from the top), with its even more mysterious & gratuitous quotation marks:


You can't see it, but the second flyer from the bottom lists the laundry's hours and charges, and concludes "My name is Ley; I also sell shrimp." All in all an admirably on-message advertising campaign.

So it seemed perfectly natural that when Mikala went to pick up our clean clothes on Friday, she also came away with a big bag of shrimp, which Ley retrieved from an enormous freezer sitting among the washing machines. We took them back to the beach house and fried them up in garlic and butter and had them with pasta for Andrew's birthday dinner. Yum!

Papa's birthday celebration also included a special thematic Bananagrams game:


And the consumption of a dense and delicious birthday cake, which Mikala managed to order from the local bakery without having to resort to too much sign language.


You can imagine the excitement this cake stirred up among the local niños y niñas as Simon and Mikala paraded it through town back to the beach house!

So: Feliz Cumpleaños, Querido Andrés! We're mighty glad you were born. And we can't think of a better place to turn 48 than on a beach in Yelapa, with homemade margaritas, plenty of chocolate, and delicious shrimp fresh from the laundry.


P.S. The really big fun of Andrew's birthday was the Mariettas trip, which he's promised to tell you about himself. Soon!