Jennifer MacKay. Photo by Margo Howells.

It was a desire to do something different for a while that first brought us to Alamos. My husband, David, and our two daughters, Salina and Elly, were happily living in the Bay Area, and we were working for Backroads (an active travel company), along with several other side jobs. We lived at the base of beautiful Mt. Tamalpais, where we could step out our door to hike and mountain bike. We had great roommates and life was good. We had it in the back of our minds that, once our girls were big enough, we’d seek out an alternative life to the ‘semi-traditional’ one we were living.

The twist of fate that brought us to Alamos involved David’s mother, Margo, who fell in love with and married Richard Howells. Not only was Richard a great guy, he happened to have an old house in Alamos. In February 1994, we took a month off and road tripped down to Alamos in a big van we borrowed from Backroads. We took all the ‘libre’ ways on the highway and the journey was a long one with two small girls. As we drove into Alamos at 3 a.m., we were immediately blown away by the beauty of the town. And as the door was opened to La Ciudadela, Margo and Richard’s historic, elegant, semi-lived-in, house, we stepped into the magic of Alamos.

That was in 1994… now it’s 2012 and we are still here and Alamos is our home. In the first few years, we made our home in the magical La Ciudadela and slowly began fixing up the old place, which was an endless job, but worth it. We explored the area around Alamos on mountain bike, on foot and by car, spending much time getting lost on the Sierra de Alamos and biking all the back roads we could find. Salina and Elly played their days away in the many corners of La Ciudadela. They learned to ride their bikes on the streets around the plaza (back when there were barely any cars!). It didn’t take them long to make friends and our place was always full of girls of all ages who came to play. Some of these girls are still strong family friends to this day. We began to pick up the occasional odd job… like hanging Christmas lights in trees of the courtyards of people’s homes. We also started to take people out on hikes and rides and such. For the first four years, we didn’t have a  phone so everything was done rather creatively!

We had fixed up the Ciudadela to the point where we started renting rooms and sort of magically created a great little business. During that time, we also participated in a FAM (familiarization) trip for birding tour companies, and that is when David fell in love with birding. After several more years of back and forth, we decided to put our ‘eggs in one basket,’ and we created our business, Solipaso S.A. de C.V., which allowed us to work legally in ‘tourist services.’

Meanwhile, the girls were happily attending school next door to our house. I became president of the PTA and participated in school activities for the duration of their time in the public school system in Alamos. Being a part of the school system here has given us the opportunity to really become a part of the community and although we were ‘different’, we were always fully embraced. Salina and Elly were the first foreigners to go all the way through school in Alamos and graduate from the Cobach!

Margo and Richard retired and moved to Alamos, and we moved into the Obregon 3 building, which we remodeled a bit into Café del Sol and our new home. El Pedregal, which was Elizabeth Nuzum’s little art studio and country getaway, wasn’t really for sale, but she was happy to sell it to someone who would continue to grow her vision of El Pedregal. We bought the surrounding land from the Jacobys  and proceeded to scheme, dream, dig and build our little nature lodge and retreat center. All the girls’ friends came out to have fun. We bought them a scooter, which won us major points and allowed them to zip around all over Alamos.

El Pedregal is now our home and business in Alamos. We created a sanctuary for us and our guests. I have my sacred straw bale yoga studio and massage room that I enjoy every moment I’m in there. David has his bountiful vegetable garden. The birds have their feeders and the dogs live the good life here. We continue to run Solipaso tours: small group birding and natural history trips all over Mexico, as well as a few local day trips. I’ve gotten more involved with conservation, working with Nature and Culture International, and donating my time to live the dream of creating a park and green space for Alamos.

Alamos has been a great place to be a family and to raise our children, who are now both off in the world doing their thing as amazing young women. It has provided us with the freedom to create our own reality and our own business where no two days are the same, life is dynamic and interesting, and where one can truly make a difference. All while it has always been just a good and peaceful place work and live. We continue to travel with our work and wander the world, but it’s always good to get home to Alamos.

April Quisenberry Pruitt. Photo by Janet Anderson.

As a child in southern California, I loved the architecture of the missions, the Mexican music, and the trips with classmates to Olvera Street, a mock Mexican town in Los Angeles. Later, in Colorado I became aware of the indigenous side of the story. These Spanish and their missions didn’t just arrive into empty land, but into a rich indigenous culture. The ways that the natives lived, their homes, families, music, art, what they ate, how they entertained themselves, and especially their spirituality began to become more and more interesting. Many of my friends, both when I was a child and young adult, were of Spanish or Mexican heritage and I was further attracted by the stories of my parents’ trips to Mexico, where my mother explored the area while my father painted.

Although there was ample opportunity for exposure to Spanish/Mexican architecture and culture for me in California and Colorado, firsthand knowledge of the indigenous peoples was slight. As an adult living and working with various Coast Salish Native peoples in the Pacific Northwest and Inupiat and Yup’ik (Eskimos) in Alaska, it was my chance to learn from actual participation rather than just from books. I never lost my love, however, for the Spanish architecture and for the Mexican people. And I did learn. In the 60s, while living in Kotzebue, an Inupiat village in Arctic Alaska, I had even proposed to build a Spanish or Moorish design house with an interior courtyard, rather than a typical Eskimo house that was open to the beach, to facilitate use of the resources of the sea. I was nearly laughed out of the village, since my Mexican house would surely fill up with drifted snow. The idea of an enclosed house was anathema to the Inupiat, whose dwellings are open to all who wish to enter and to whom the ownership of the land is as foreign as a walled garden.

In 1984, as my husband, Rod, and I made the transition from commercial salmon trolling and fish camps to our more traditional careers, we found ourselves with a winter free before our new life began. We packed up our three kids and spent the winter in Zihuatanejo and San Miguel de Allende. I knew that I must find a way to stay in Mexico.

In 2003 we found ourselves once again without obligation and with an opportunity to come to Mexico for a while. Jeannie Carpenter, Diane’s daughter, suggested we come down to Alamos and stay in Diane’s house. Although still in Alaska herself, Diane graciously agreed and gave us a long list of people to meet and things to do. We were in that beautiful house for about four months and spent each summer afterward renting various places in Alamos. One of those summers we found a little three-room Mexican house in El Perico with a large lot and five mature fruit trees. Perfect!

When Rod and I retired from school administration and youth wellness program administration in Alaska, we began to remodel the house and only had to go back to work in the States once to get doors and windows on it. Teaching on the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico for two years was an adventure more than a job for me.

All of these things brought me here but on a “long and winding road” that passed through tipis and tents, babies and teenagers, gurus, shamans, fishing boats, and even silk-shirt-and-high-heel jobs. The road always pointed me toward Alamos. There was a way all along to earn money in Alaska and live in Mexico; it’s called retirement and it took us many more years to reach that goal. Now that we’re back in Alamos, I have been able to continue learning about indigenous cultures of this wonderful country, thanks to my dear friend, Elena Chavarría.