Living in Vallarta with Beach Crossers

It's interesting living in Puerto Vallarta, well actually Nuevo Vallarta. Since we started our beach wheelchair rental company, Beach Crossers, we have learned a million things. This week it seems like we are going to learn about the mapache (raccoon).

The first night I was back to Vallarta, I had a visitor. I never saw the visitor, but it got into the kitchen trash and made a bit of a mess. Not too big of a mess as having just returned to the apartment, there wasn't much in the trash. Many people tried to convince me that it was "Google" the cat, but I had never known him to get into the garbage before so I was skeptical. The next evening as I was sitting at the dark dining room table with my computer, the slider opened. I casually said, "Hi Googs." but quickly smelled the odor of a wild, trash eating, pest of a raccoon. I knew without a doubt that it was not Google coming in, so I jumped up from the table and backed away. I'm sure I startled the animal, but with the lights out I had no way to know if it had left or not. I grabbed a flashlight, turned on all of the lights and began to search. I knew that shaking the patio chairs would not send him scurrying if he was holed up. Well, after about an hour of searching, I concluded that he (I truly have no way of knowing if it was in fact a he or a she) had left. I closed everything up tight even though it was still stinking hot and headed to bed. For a few nights I kept the house closed up. One night the frisky visitor came in through a bedroom window that I had left open about 2 inches. Yes, I put a stick in the window. I showed the opening to the grounds keeper in the morning and to one of my neighbors. Both were certain a raccoon could not come through that small opening, but I had seen it leave that way, so I was certain that it could ... and did come through that opening. So, even a small amount of air was out of the question :(  This morning when the neighbor's cat, Google got up to leave at 6:00 in the morning (he spends the night here sometimes since his owner got a puppy... with permission from dad of course!) I decided it was probably morning enough to open things up. Five minutes! It took five minutes for the bandit to find his way to the slider and come in. Of course I had barely made my way back to bed so I bounced up and once again told it to "get out of my house." It turned it's little raccoon head around and looked at my from my dining room table to see if I meant what I said. I clapped my hands a few times and he moseyed back out of the door. What to do?