Recently a letter, signed by six different Merced County chamber of commerces was presented to the Merced County Board of Supervisors which demanded a more aggressive approach to business development in the county and stated that there was a “lack of confidence” in the county’s efforts to bring in new business.

  Our plan for retirement was to spend half our time in Mexico and half our time here in the San Joaquin Valley. That was ten years ago when we sailed south out of San Francisco Bay on our Day Dreamer, the 32 foot sailing sloop.

  This year we left California the first week in November and returned the first week in April.

  We left 90 degree weather and by the time we reached Mojave, the temperature was below 50 with a wind chill factor that brought it down to 40. We were freezing.

It hit at 2 a.m. in the morning with a jolt that nearly knocked me out of bed. Back in the recesses of my mouth was a pain which only could be described as agonizing.

My teeth are very good for a 72 year old. Few cavities, perhaps due to the fact that my parents were one of the first to insist that their children drink fluorinated water.

But this is Mexico and the nearest full time dentist is 200 miles away.

We had some medication with us. One left over Amoxicillin pill and Bactrim an all purpose sulfur antibiotic. I took the Amoxicillin pill and sucked on an ice cube hoping the pain would go away.

It was an all night battle and one in which I was the loser.

We were sailing south to La Paz on the first leg of our trip to the Panama Canal when the batteries on the boat went dead. It’s true, we are sailors, however we have an auxiliary motor for when there is no wind.

Sailing over 1,000 miles without a motor would be fool hardy. We pulled into a beautiful bay called Bahia St. Nicholas and spent the night.

There was a nesting pair of eagles on the pinnacles not far from the boat and we watched them until the sun went down. Expecting a quiet evening in the bay, we were surprised when the first Panga arrived.

Hughson citizen Mark Fontana asked the city for a list of property owners with larger water pipes March 9 in anticipation of water bill rate changes. Fontana told the city council he wants to explain “inequities” in the proposed rates to homeowners while trying to “get the city to back down on the rate increase for the 1-inch water line services.”

“People didn’t necessarily have a choice what size line they had when they bought their home,” he told the council. “Citizens of the city should be made aware of what size line they have.”

It should have been a sign. Even before we left the paved road, our Blue Baja Bug decided it didn’t want to change gears and we had to buddy with one of the other drivers and leave the bug behind.

This trip would be the most rugged we had ever made, taking us back into parts of Mexico which rarely sees any gringos and is so cut off from civilization that the most common things are unheard of.

We cut off the main road and headed for the town of Magdelena, which is known for making beautiful brades of garlic. We stopped and talked to an elderly man who seemed to be in

With the war of the drug lords raging across the border, it might be hard to imagine that there is a whole different world in parts of Mexico where Americans play a vital role in the community.

Six hundred miles south of the border in the town of Mulege, there is a Rotary dental client run totally by volunteer dentists, most of whom are retired and work one or two days a week providing dental care for the community.

The Mulege Rotary Club raises money to run the client by holding two major events,

This is decision time for the Walmart Distribution Center, and to make sure that all the issues are heard, the City of Merced will be doubling the legal amount of time for the public to be heard.

At stake is a facility which could hire hundreds of new workers, who either live now in the Merced County area or who logically move to the area and take some of the stress off the housing market.

The main issues are air quality and how the

The Turquoise Mine was off the only highway in this part of Baja Mexico, not a difficult drive, however one made much easier with the Blue Baja Bug which we had recently purchase for the astronomical sum of $700.

The purchase price was just the start of a Mexican plan to revive the economy by providing Americans with toys which always need fixing, and therefor will enploy dozens until it is passed on to the next unsuspecting purchaser.

However for now it was the perfect vehicle to take us to a

Surely, you've heard the buzzword blog. Its all the rage lately. This column is even considered a blog when posted to MercedCountyTimes.net.

What exactly is a blog? As a word, it is a contraction of the term weblog. An exact definition is hard to find, because blogs are whatever the writer makes them. In its simplest form, a blog is a website that is updated on a regular basis with facts, news, thoughts, etc. Newest blog entries are at the top of the website and archives are available. Readers of blogs can comment on the blog entries.