We know that the Mexicans can create a world famous tourist resort from nothing. They did it recently in the Caribbean at Cancun in south east Mexico, which had a population of three and a few coconut trees until 1970.  Now they are trying the same trick in the north west of the country at Puerto Penasco, or Rocky Point as it is known to English speakers.  An arm of the Pacific Ocean forced its way into north west Mexico, creating a great inland sea, the Sea of Cortez.  The northern extremity of this sea creeps to where Rocky Point is located, only 66 miles from the border with the United States.  Pat and I visited Rocky Point in May 2012. Until the 1920s, there was nothing here.  A few fishermen would sometimes drop anchor, but that was all. Then someone built the first hotel and it was near enough to the United States to attract Americans fleeing from the hardships of prohibition. Gangster Al Capone from Chicago even bought a house here.  Opportunistic US realtors, including Long Realty, set up offices here as early as 1926.  World War Two helped the recently founded community, when the US government built a road from its border to Rocky Point.  Presumably it feared that the Japanese Navy might sail up the Sea of Cortez and attack the unguarded underbelly of America in an encore of Pearl Harbor. At the same time, a railway was built linking the Baja Peninsula to the rest of Mexico. It passed through Rocky Point.

The waters of the Sea of Cortez are superbly blue and the climate is a delight, reminiscent of southern California at its best.  The beaches are abundant and sandy.  There are now many hotels and restaurants in Rocky Point and plenty of condos for sale.  Sams Club is building a store in Rocky Point.  Do not worry if your Spanish is less fluent than you would like. English is widely spoken and there are many American visitors.  US dollars are accepted everywhere.  There is a spectacular golf course with its green fairways vividly contrasting with the grey of the surrounding desert.  The area even has its own volcano, El Pinacate, which hasn’t even bothered to erupt for 11,000 years.  This is so boring compared with Vesuvius (see this website’s item on Pompeii, Italy) which has erupted on dozens of occasions in the past two thousand years.  Rocky Point has focused only for the past twenty years on the idea of becoming a grand tourist resort.  Before that its fishing fleet was the major source of income, even though it tended to overfish the Sea of Cortez.  The Mexican government has now decreed that fishing stops in March.  At the time of our visit, we saw many shrimp boats, but they were all in shipyards having barnacles scraped off their bottoms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So how is Rocky Point doing in its ambitions to become a second Cancun?  Certainly there are positives. A small airport has been opened, even though it is used only by small private planes and no commercial airline has yet been persuaded to operate scheduled flights.  Preparations are being made for the building of a passenger liner dock in Rocky Point and the Holland America and Carnival lines have shown interest in operating cruises from that dock into the Sea of Cortez.  These would be seven day cruises calling at a small port every day and thereby avoiding long periods at sea.   To set against these positives, there are negatives.  Rocky Point reminds me of a convict, innocent of the crime for which it has been sentenced, but nevertheless guilty of other serious crimes with which it has not been charged.

It is claimed that, particularly in this border area, Mexico is not safe for US tourists because of violence generated by the drug cartels.  Last summer, the US State Department even issued a travel advisory warning its citizens of the dangers of visiting Rocky Point and other border areas.  There is no basis for this warning, which has unfairly damaged the tourist industry in Rocky Point.  There has been no violence shown towards US citizens.  The place is safe.  Indeed it is a good deal safer than many US cities, such as Baltimore, where Pat and I have lived.  That’s the charge of which Rocky Point is innocent.  Now here’s where Rocky Point is guilty.  All the well designed, expensive properties here are mixed up in every part of the town with what can only be described either as slum properties or as unsightly undeveloped land. Such land is usually enclosed by rusting fences topped with barbed wire. Many streets are unpaved and lined with litter.  How can anyone, either Mexican or American, enjoy a beautiful property when it is surrounded by trash?  Until Rocky Point copes with this problem, its hopes of emulating Cancun are zero.

White Hart Lane Home of Tottenham Hotspur

Of all the locations described on this website, the first one that I ever visited was the stadium in White Hart Lane, Tottenham, where my favorite soccer club plays. Tottenham is a suburb to the north of London, England.  The club was founded in 1882. For a short time in its early years, it played its games at Northumberland Park, Tottenham, land once owned by the Dukes of Northumberland.

Henry Hotspur Percy

An ancestor of that family was Sir Henry Percy (1366 -1403). Nicknamed Harry Hotspur, he was a famous English soldier in his day. Like George Washington centuries later, Hotspur rebelled against the King of England. He took on the royalist forces at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. However, he was unable to foreshadow Washington’s Yorktown success in 1781 and poor Harry finished the battle without his head. He became better known half a millennium later, when the club adopted his name and became known all over the world as Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. The club also has its own nickname of “Spurs”.

Spurs legend Jimmy Greaves

My first visit to the stadium in White Hart Lane was in 1944, during World War Two, to see Spurs play Fulham in a match in the wartime league. Players wore huge boots with bulbous toecaps, far different from the slipper-like footwear of today.

During the 68 years which have followed my first visit, I have watched Spurs play whenever the opportunity has arisen. This has been much easier for me recently, because Spurs’ games are now shown live on television all over the world. Watching in America is an early morning undertaking because of time zone differences. This allows one to enjoy a nice big English breakfast at halftime.

Spurs White Hart Lane stadium

In the late 1940s, the crowds at White Hart Lane were huge. There would be 60,000 or 70,000 spectators inside the stadium, with thousands of disappointed latecomers locked out. The stadium was divided between stands, where everyone was seated, and terraces where everyone was standing. Eventually the nanny state intervened and decreed that all spectators at big matches had to be seated. This has reduced the capacity of the stadium to only about 36,000. Today the stadium is always filled to that capacity. Obtaining tickets is almost as difficult as getting in to see the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany (see my story on this). Plans are well advanced to build a larger stadium on the existing site.

London fog could once cause matches to be abandoned but, by mid-century, clean air legislation had largely put an end to London fog. Certainly, in 68 years, I can never recall a Spurs match being abandoned. That is until last Saturday when Spurs were playing Bolton at White Hart Lane in the quarter final of the FA Cup. I very much wanted to see the game. The FA Cup is the oldest football competition in the world. Spurs won the FA Cup in 1901 and several times since. This year they are the bookies’ favorites to win it again.

Fabrice Muamba

On the morning of March 17, 2012, St. Patrick’s day, I had promised to drop off our daughter, Tara, at the airport in Tucson, Arizona. She kindly suggested that we arrive in Tucson early and that, on our way to the airport, we find a sports bar that was showing the game. After climbing over many green-clad customers who were celebrating St. Paddy too early and too well, we finally found a TV set showing the game. It was on the ESPN channel. We watched the first 41 minutes, after which the score was 1-1. Then the game was abandoned!  What happened was this. A 23-year old Bolton player, Fabrice Muamba, having just come off the field and standing alone on the sidelines, literally dropped dead. His heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Howard Webb (in blue shirt)

In charge of the game was the top soccer referee in the world, Howard Webb, who had been referee for the World Cup final in South Africa in 2010. Muamba was stretchered off to hospital and the referee abandoned the game. Neither players nor crowd were in a mood to continue. Many people were praying for that young man’s recovery and prayer works – see my earlier article entitled “Paris, France”. Those prayers were answered when the medics succeeded in re-starting his heart after 78 minutes. Although he is at present still in intensive care, he is now sitting up in bed and talking in both English and French. However, I doubt that he still has a career in soccer to look forward to.

As for me, I have something to look forward to. The abandoned match has been re-scheduled for next Tuesday, when I can watch it in the comfort of my own home without being distracted by any noisy leprechauns.

Is there in the English language a word that refers to as many diverse things as the word ‘Dakota’? Here are just a few of its uses:

It is a popular first name used by both boys and girls.It is a native American tribe, part of the Sioux nation, who use a language which is also called Dakota.It is a famous light truck, the Dodge Dakota.

There have been unlucky ships called the SS Dakota. One sank off the Welsh coast in 1877 and another off the Japanese coast in 1907.

A successful 1945 film, starring John Wayne, was called Dakota.

Dakota is the name of such contrasting entities as an English rock band and a New York City apartment block.

It is a fossil which it is claimed is 67 million years old.

It was a brand of cigarette that tried and failed to take over Marlboro’s share of the market and was subsequently withdrawn.

It was a military transport plane, also called the C47, which was much in use during the latter part of World War Two.

When the United States doubled in size in 1803, because President Thomas Jefferson bought from France a great chunk of land in a deal known as the Louisiana purchase, the northern part of that land was known as Dakota.

Yet the most frequent use of the word today is in relation to two American states, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Pat, along with our daughter, Anna, and I made our first visit to the Dakotas in 2011, when we visited Mount Rushmore. There is an excellent visitor center combined with walkways and a platform which allowed us a perfect view of these carvings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mt. Rushmore is largely composed of granite and is located near the town of Keystone in the black hills of South Dakota. It is the tallest mountain in the region and is named after Charles E. Rushmore, a successful New York lawyer.

Between 1927 and 1941, events took place which led to the mountain becoming the top tourist attraction in South Dakota, visited by millions every year. What occurred between those years was the carving into the face of the mountain of 60 foot tall sculptures of the faces of four US presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Mt. Rushmore

The sculptures face to the south east, which gives them maximum exposure to the sun. It was planned at first that the images of the four presidents would be carved from head to waist, but shortage of funds has left us with their heads only.

A great ambition of film producer Alfred Hitchcock, was to make a film the climax of which would be a chase across the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore. He did so and his 1959 release, called North by North West starring Cary Grant, was a great success. However the authorities would not allow him to shoot on Mount Rushmore. He had to build a replica of the presidential faces in Hollywood and film it there.

View a trailer of the movie that shows a clip of the chase scene across Hitchock’s Hollywood Mt. Rushmore in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We never reached the state of North Dakota, which is a pity because it is here that the future of the United States of America will be written. A recent report claims that, thanks in large part to North Dakota, there is three times as much oil in the United States as in Saudi Arabia. As oil extraction technology improves this figure is constantly being revised upwards. The implications of this are enormous. It could mean gasoline at two dollars a gallon or less forever. It could means that the vast US national debt could be paid off, instead of being left as a burden around the necks of generations yet to come.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The oil boom in North Dakota is taking place in the north western part of the state. In a five county area, the number of oil wells there has recently increased from 800 to 6000. The boom in natural gas has been just as spectacular. North Dakota is now the fourth largest oil producing state in the country, recently exceeding production in Louisiana. It is expected to overtake third place California later this year. Population in the state, after falling for years, is now increasing.

Bakken Formation Map

These oil fields are grouped around an area of rock known as the Bakken formation. The State of North Dakota reported in 2007 estimated that there are 2.1 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Bakken. By the end of 2010, production was exceeding capacity to ship oil out of the Bakken. Other estimates claim that the figure of 2.1 billion is far too low and that 18 billion to 24 billion barrels is far more realistic.

Much of this oil production is taking place on private land, which makes it difficult for the Federal Government and the environmentalists to obstruct progress. US oil production is very much dependent on the outcome of the November 2012 elections, which have been rightly called the most important of our lifetime. The future of North Dakota is at stake and time will tell.