Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico

Sonora is a harshly beautiful place.


These pictures are from a morning trip we took to a biosphere reserve. We drove to see some volcanoes.

Pretty good volcano, huh?

We were impressed. We were also very glad to get back in the car with its lovely air conditioning. Just a couple minutes' walk made you all sweaty, especially if you happened to be the one with a baby.

This is just a part of the group we were with: the "peoples." Not pictured are the "kids." Those were Nathan's names for the groups our houseful naturally devolved into: the teenagers, the young adults, and the family. We weren't sure how a family on vacation with a bunch of single people would go, but it was excellent. A houseful of people who view kids as playthings, so there was nearly always (unfortunately, not at 6 am) someone willing to play with them. Not to mention, a houseful of people to pitch in with cooking and cleaning.

But I digress. A few words about the place we visited:

We went to a small resort town that clings to the ocean for survival: fishing and tourism. The house we stayed in is in a gated community, a narrow strip of elegant houses along the pristine beaches. Across the dirt road that leads to those houses, though, is desert. Dry, hot, desolate desert. The economy and American concerns about safety have hit the town hard. Everywhere, we saw someone's ambitious plans for a new beach house, or a new hotel, a skeleton of a partially-built structure, abandoned. Not so unlike the States, in that respect.

We enjoyed our stay, but we agreed we couldn't go there too often. It's too sad. In America, we live a very basic lifestyle, but it's relative opulence compared to what we saw there. We saw people living in a plywood shack underneath the power lines. We saw a man sleeping by the side of the road, waiting for someone to buy one of his load of watermelons.

What accident of birth or capitalism made us the ones zipping through town in our air-conditioned car, with our plentiful food and clean water to drink? Why do we as Americans feel entitled to a standard of living that is ridiculous compared to the rest of the world? I feel guilty, and lucky, and feel guilty for feeling lucky.