yes, the rains have begun

Tropical downpour

The answer to the title of the previous post is a definite YES, the rains are here.  We’ve had tropical downpours every afternoon for the last week.   So far they have been in the late afternoon, early evening, the temps drop and the winds are cool and fresh.  It’s been fantastic sleeping weather.

I have lots of other things to tell you about, mainly the 50th anniversay of the founding of Akumal last weekend but I’ll get to that in another post.   For now, the rains are mainly on the plains of my mind.

I’m really glad that they came now.  Last year they didn’t start until almost August but they could have started anytime between now and then.  This is the first rain since the house was finished and we moved in, we knew there would be things discovered when they started.    I think I mentioned that we are getting ready to go north in the RV for a month or so?   The Brits are sitting on the house while we are gone and I would have hated for them to have to deal with it.

We first noticed when we came back from Akumal that the planter area in the guest bath was full of dirt, then it rained and filled with water.  Mimi spent hours with the wet vac pulling out construction debris.  The rains the next day proved that it still didn’t drain.  This time we noticed the knee deep swimming pool on the roof outside our bedroom.  That got us on the phone to Henry and soon he was here with the project boss and workers.  Lots of activity as we noticed water coming down the wall in the hallway and then more water dripping from the ceiling in 2 places in the kitchen.

As it turned out, the dry well that gets all the runoff from the front of the house just doesn’t drain fast enough.  It took some time to get to that as drains were snaked and water pumped out.   So, the solution we picked involves an overflow drain that takes water down the side of the house to the street.  It will only come into use if the water starts to back up from the dry well.

It’s a common solution but perhaps not entirely on the up and up, so some of the work will be done this weekend.   The other option would have been to tear up the floor in the hall and put in an overflow to the cave we discovered under the garage.  I wasn’t really happy with that idea so I picked sending it to the street.

There were other smaller problems.  The open area that vents the laundry room also faces east and most of these storms come from the east.  Water blew in and over the shelves in there, not a huge deal as everything was in plastic but not something we want to live with.  The solution there will be shutters that can be closed when it’s raining.  It will still be open to the air with mosquito netting but aluminum shutters will be over it.  The ceiling is really high and the opening is recessed so there will be some kind of pulley to open and close them.   Also, one of the glass blocks in the roof over the hall cracked and is leaking.  I think that is related to the foot or two of water that was standing over it.   They can’t replace it until we get 2 days of dry weather.

I’m not surprised by any of this, you can’t test for the kind of downpours we get here, you have to see how it goes.  The dry well for the front of the house just goes into too much solid rock and water can’t escape fast enough.   When it rains here, it is an incredible deluge.  We had a bucket out in the back during one rain and in less than half an hour there were 2 inches of water in it.

Check the picture of the pond from yesterday afternoon, the ‘waves’ are from the rain.

The result of all this is we won’t be leaving until next week, we’d planned to leave this week.  No surprise there, we are always late whatever we are doing.  I still haven’t decided which way we will go but it is looking like we will head up the Gulf coast to the dreaded Texas and across to California from there.  I hate crossing the border in Texas and I hate the endless drive from there across west TX.  It makes more sense though, we have to get insurance and maybe change the registration on the RV and Jeep and Texas is the easiest way to do that.  Also, gas is now cheaper in the US so driving on the north side of the border will cost less.  We’re taking the fur kids and not a lot else, we plan to clean out what we have stored up there and bring it back in the RV.   Hopefully we can return down the west coast and visit some friends along the way in Mazatlán (that would be you Nancy) and perhaps a stop in Ajijic, Guadalajara and Michoacán.  It’s all up in the air though, we are never sure where we will go in the RV until we are there.