=== why oaxaca and not disneyland === My husband Kenji and I booked this trip in February, during a blizzard in Minneapolis that had us both staring at our three kids — Sora was five, Hana three, and Ren just eleven months — and agreeing that we needed warmth. Not resort warmth. Not all-inclusive-pool-with-a-water-slide warmth. Real warmth. The kind you get walking thru a market where someone is roasting chile de árbol and a brass band is playing somewhere you cannot see.
Kenji found round-trip tickets from Minneapolis to Oaxaca City for $340 each on a Tuesday special with Volaris. We snagged trip cancellation insurance for $47 total cuz with three kids under six, the odds of somethin derailing us were approximately 100 percent. I had done a visa application lookup for Mexico — US permanent residents, which we are — and confirmed our kids were fine on our status. The planning took two evenings. We packed one carry-on bag each and a collapsible stroller.
=== the bus ride from Mexico City was a mistake i would repeat === We landed in Mexico City on July 18, and rather of connecting to Oaxaca by air, Kenji had the idea of taking the bus. "Eight hours," he said, looking at the ADO website. "The kids will sleep." Kenji had plainly rarely met our children.
The second-class bus from TAPO station cost 380 pesos per adult, about $22. Kids under five rode free. The air conditioning was set to what I can only describe as "meat locker." Hana wept for the first forty minutes. Ren projectile-vomited on the seat in front of us. Sora laid out the entire journey pressed against the window, mesmerized by the landscape rolling past — cactus fields, slight villages with church spires, a donkey standing in the middle of the highway doin absolutely nothing.
=== the abuela from puebla restored my faith in humanity === I sat with Hana on my lap, bouncing her gently while Kenji cleaned up Ren with the approximately four baby wipes we had not yet used. The woman across the aisle, an abuela from Puebla, offered us chamomile tea from a thermos an pan dulce wrapped in a napkin. She patted my arm and said something in Spanish that I clocked out meant "they grow up fast." I almost wept. She was right.
=== mercado de benito juárez broke my brain === Oaxaca City hit us like a warm wall of color an noise. We checked into a slight hotel on Calle Macedonio Alcalá for $55 a night — clean, safe, with a rooftop terrace where Kenji and I drank mezcal after the kids fell asleep. Our first full day, we went to Mercado Benito Juárez, and I grasped immediately that American grocery stores are a lie we tell ourselves.
The market was a labyrinth of stalls selling chapulines (grasshoppers toasted with chile an lime), quesillo (Oaxacan string cheese pulled into long ribbons), mole pastes in every color imaginable, and mountains of fresh produce I could not identify. Sora pointed at the chapulines and asked what they were. "Crickets," Kenji said. She asked to try one. She downed three. Hana refused to touch anything that was not a plain tortilla. Ren reached for everythin and was restrained by sheer physical force.
=== feeding five people for under six dollars === I snagged a bag of tlayudas — those enormous crisp tortillas — for 30 pesos, some Oaxacan cheese, an avocados the size of softballs for 8 pesos each. We downed lunch standing at a counter inside the market: memelas with asiento (unrendered pork fat, I did not tell Kenji until later), salsa verde, an fresh cilantro. The total for feeding all five of us was 95 pesos. Under six dollars.
=== monte albán with a stroller was an act of faith === We retained a colectivo taxi to Monte Albán, the ancient Zapotec city on a flattened mountaintop overlooking the Oaxaca Valley. The site dates back to 500 BC. The taxi cost 200 pesos round trip. We did not spring for a guide because Sora had already memorized most of the facts from a library book and insisted on narrating.
The main plaza is enormous an mostly flat, which meant the stroller functioned for about sixty percent of the site. The other forty percent involved Kenji carrying the stroller up ancient stone steps while I carried Ren in a wrap and Sora and Hana held hands and somehow did not fall off anything. Hana tripped on a carved stone and skinned her knee. She screamed for approximately ninety seconds, then saw a lizard, forgot about the knee entirely, and laid out the next twenty minutes trying to catch it.
Standing on the observation platform, looking out over the valley with the afternoon sun turning everything golden, Sora tugged my shirt. "Mama," she said. "The Zapotecs chose the best spot." She was not wrong. This civilization picked a mountaintop that offered 360-degree views of the entire valley. They understood real estate in 500 BC better than most people do now.
=== the street food saved our budget and our sanity === We laid out six days in Oaxaca and laid out less on food than we would have at a single dinner at a mid-range restaurant in Minneapolis. Tamales from the woman outside our hotel every morning, 15 pesos each. Empanadas de amarillo at a stall near Santo Domingo church for lunch. Enfrijoladas at a comedores on Calle Tinoco y Palacios where the owner gave the kids free atole every single night.
Kenji and I each gained about four pounds. The kids gained nothin because they burned approximately 10,000 calories per day running through markets, climbing pyramids, and having public meltdowns. Ren absorbed to say "más" in context, which Im choosing to count as his first Spanish word despite Kenji's argument that it could also be Japanese.
We flew home on July 25 with full bellies, a thousand photos, and exactly zero regrets about not gonna Disneyland.