Interesting post, I spend a lot of time down there for work. We only get time venture out when in Queretaro though, which doesn't feel much like the rest of Mexico.
Queretaro has a most amazing gun range and gun club. If you missed my posts about it, you can find them in the thread started by Ganderite called "Double Action Snubby" which is just a few pages further down in this same "Pistols and Revolvers" sub-section of the forum.
https://www.canadiangunnutz.com/forum/showthread.php/1942156-Double-Action-Snubby
Posts in particular with photos of the Queretaro Club would be posts numbers 55, 141, 155, 157 and 160. Post number 212 also features photos of the San Miguel Club, which I just visited a month ago. The two clubs are loosely united and together formed the hub of the "San Miguel-Queretaro Practical Shooting" group. At the time, the T.V. show "Sons of Anarchy" was quite popular and we directly stole the "SAMCRO" from the T.V. Show and made it part of our logo as "SaM-Qro", because we don't need no stinkin' badges. (We did make up patches and hats, though.)
I am in more-or-less daily contact with both Clubs via Whatts App, and every year I spend the month of February in Salamanca and take the time to visit both Clubs as I can. I believe I am putting on a training clinic at the Queretaro Club in the later part of February, 2021 depending on conditions on the ground at the time. My wife and I will be moving back to Mexico in late 2022 or early 2023 and we will be living just outside the city of Guanajuato, on the road to San Miguel but before La Sauceda. I intend to continue working with both Clubs and the shooting programs. Also, there is a nice range in Salamanca that I was told just last month when I was there is still active. Next year I will make contact with them again, I did some training clinics for that Club in the late 1990's and it is a small, rustic Club but with some well thought-out facilities that have much potential.
On days where I suffer the doldrums, thoughts of getting back to Mexico in retirement with a challenging self-made job of once again rekindling the SaM-Qro Practical shooting group -- which has not grown at all since I left it but we hope to restart it somewhat with my 2021 clinic -- brings a glitter back to my eyes.
Queretaro has grown immensely in the last 20 years. I was first there in the late 1980's, having "met a girl" on a beach trip in 1988 in Puerto Escondido. That relationship fizzled as she was from a well-to-do family and at the time I did not speak Spanish. 15 years later, during almost all of which I had been living and working in Mexico fulltime, me and some of the San Miguel Club guys "reached out" to the Queretaro Club to see if they would like to let us use their amazing facilities in return for which, we'd bring them into the modern age with our Practical Pistol program. In pure Mexican style, they told us they would consider it.
A few weeks later, at a meeting in one of the better Queretaro Pizza restaurants, the Club President (who, amazingly, is President of the Club once again after all these years!) asked me quietly "Do you know Adriana Villareal?"
"Errr," I hesitated, a bit taken aback by the question. "Yes, I do." He nodded, then smiled.
"Well," he said, "she is my sister-in-law. She speaks well of you. We will work with you."
Small world.
I was in Queretaro just over a month ago, but just for a couple of hours at the Costco with some of the San Miguel guys buying steaks and stuff for a B.B.Q., pre-Corona-lockdown. That town has sure grown. I used to be able to just fly around that town in my little Batmobile, back in the '90's when it was still just growing beyond it's infrastructure but still used the same old roads. Now, there are over-passes everywhere and half of Mexico City seems to have migrated to Queretaro. Amazing. I could get lost there now, almost. And, it is somewhat more dangerous there than it used to be.
The Batmobile. In the batcave. It's why you've never seen me and Bruce Wayne together at a party.
