We had the car until noon today, and had decided to go back and try to find the gallery of an artist called Diana Bryer (if you've been in Darlene's private office, you might remember one of her pictures). When we were in Tuchas on Monday, we had stopped at an artist's co-op to look at some things, and had y chance intercepted a phone call from Diana while there. So we felt we were pushed to go and see her (no great pain for either of us, since we both quite like her work), and only had to find her. This was harder than you might expect. She did not put her address on the website, but her town was on it. Which was fine, except that the town was not on the map. So we set the GPS to take us somewhere near, and thought we would ask when we got what we felt was close. Of course, we took the incorrect turn, but it didn't turn out to be "wrong". We went back to the co-op we had been at a few days earlier, and asked the woman there. She was local and said things like: "go to La Puebla, then go further and you will se it....", but La Puebla also didn't make it onto the map. And when we asked for clarification, we were told to go past this or the other artist's place (which she assumed we would know, but we didn't), and so on.
To make it more exciting, we were running on the reserve tank in the car, so we needed to get gas, and soon. And of course, there was no gas station for many miles, so we were doing some praying. Fortunately, we were mostly going downhill, and we made it to the one gas station (an Old Boys-type place where we were abut the only gringo, the guy wouldn't do a fill-up, but you bought your gas in dollar increments, and there were large grills on the outside, along with a community bulletin board).
Found the gallery of Diana Bryer, and it appeared no-one was home. But as we went around the corner of the house, we were met by a young good-lloking man who turned out to be her son, and took us to the back of the large yard to her house, and her separate gallery. The gallery was in a construction trailer which she has painted to resemble a gypsy wagon. We were admiring this when we met Diana, and that's another whole story. She is wonderful, eccentric, laconic, verbose, opinionated, friendly, open, and just plain fun. We were in a hurry, but you couldn't hurry this woman. There was a story with each painting, and sometimes a story behind the story. Darlene was using her group-leading skills to keep us a bit on track. But we bought some prints, talked for an hour longer than we expected, went into her home as well, and left on the friendliest terms with hugs and kisses all around. She's a neat lady, and I expect we'll see her again.
Then it was high-tailing it back to the car place, to return the car. They were very nice, forgave us our hour lateness, and even drove us back home. So to celebrate, we went to the Oro House on the Plaza for a beer and some food, before walking back to the apartment. It was tiring, and we both felt like sleeping a bit. In fact, I think I will do that right now.
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