Remember math class, you thought, when am I ever going to us this in the real world?  Whatever this was, let me tell you, you get to use it when you travel.  I seem to do more math than anything else.  First, there is the currency.  Translating dollars to pesos and back again.  Each location has a little bit different conversion, with some it was 10 to 1; others were 12 to 1.  The best we found was 12.95 to 1.  If you don’t think that’s a challenge.  Add to that the fact that Mexican money looks so similar, but yet so foreign.  We try really hard to have enough pesos on hand to take care of our needs, especially in the small towns and in paying for gas, but not so many that we come back with too much.  I actually keep a jar with all my left over pesos, we call it seed money for the next trip.

Gas is the next challenge, in Mexico you buy in liters, not gallons, and then the amount is in pesos.  I have no idea what we paid for gas in Mexico, pretty sure it was cheaper, but really couldn’t tell you.

Next up is kilometers vs. miles.  We are lucky that the speedometer on the Jeep does some of the conversion for us, and we have the GPS too.  I changed the Lowrance to reflect speed and distance in kilometers so we didn’t have to make the conversion every time.  Of course the BFG race book had miles, but the highway markings were in kilometers.  Just one more thing to keep you guessing.

Last math to do was Fahrenheit to Celsius, the AC units in the hotels we are at in La Paz and St Ignacio were in Celsius.  I only know that 21 was too cold and 24 was too warm, I’m guessing that 70 was somewhere in the middle.

Getting back to the states, the transition comes easier, but it’s still hard not to reach for a water bottle when brushing your teeth, and knowing that you can actually put the toilet paper in the toilet here.  Ahhh, today I am thankful for America and for my math teachers.