A bus ride to the big city so we could hit the used English bookstore. This was the extent of the itinerary my Dad put together for our day trip to Guadalajara, Mexico.

I’m not sure I’d visit Mexico if my parents hadn’t retired to Lake Chapala, a retirement community about 45 minutes from Guadalajara. But now I go at least once a year for mellow, sunny visits to hang out and catch up with my parents, who are two of my favorite people. This time around there was enough time to weave in a day trip. My Mom stayed behind to hit the gym and her singing lesson, leaving it to me and my Dad to bum around Guadalajara. The city was in capable hands.

Thursday morning we walked down the street and killed some time at the coffee shop near the bus stop. At 9:30 the bus came, and a little less than $5 and an hour later we were in Guadalajara with no Yelp, no Wi-Fi, no GPS—ready for adventure.

My Dad speaks just enough Spanish to have a few laughs, and we had a bunch of them with our cab driver as he drove us past the cheap hotels, chop shops, and squeegee guys to the tonier part of town where the bookstore was. We paid our cab fare and walked up the staircase to the light-filled rooms check out what was on the shelves.

I wandered past the CDs and vinyl into the back room where history, philosophy, poetry, and cooking lived. The history titles skewed towards cowboys and the romance of the American West while the cookbooks gave a fascinating peek into the sauce-laden, Baked Alaska tastes of post-WWII America.

I backtracked to the other room where things got a little more interesting.

Beatnicks! Hippies! Drugs! Three timeless categories, waiting for inspection. I dove in, and was thrilled to see they had a copy of fellow Worcester native Abbie Hoffman’s “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” under Hippie. I flew through the first few Worcester-centric pages and think Abbie would have dug that I read his take on the 1953 tornado that ripped through our hometown courtesy of a Mexican used bookstore. (Fun facts: I talked about this with my parents, and learned that Abbie was most likely in the same high school class as my Dad, and that Abbie’s father sold medical equipment to my Mom’s father, who was a town doctor in Leicester, MA.)

After I was done I walked around the science fiction section and struck gold. There was Religion, right next to Weird Stuff and UFO/Alien.

Though slim, these sections were chock-full of books from the 1970’s, paperback’s golden age of cheap, crazy titles. The Bermuda Triangle was well represented, as was outer space in general. Each book had signs of useful wear and tear, and the Edgar Cayce and Flying Saucer books had been vigorously annotated by a previous owner or two. Leafing through a few pages triggered an uncontrollable sneezing fit. I took that as a sign, put the books down, and went to join my father in the other room.

Neither of us bought any books and we’d had our fill, so we left made our way downtown and popped into a new bookstore and a couple of outlets. We soon ran out of stores as we ambled down a secondary road past a few grand houses that gave a dash of old money glam to a drab stretch of town that must be known for cheap business rent.

In due time the traffic got heavier, and the businesses gave way to cafes, boutiques, and Chinese restaurants. We saw more people walking around, and my dad stopped to get his shoes shined in a mini plaza near a church, which was a nice break from the heat and sun. A few blocks down we found a great café where we had lunch. After we ate we checked out the small library upstairs from the café, where it was fun to see the Dewey decimal system and free chess games waiting for action.

We continued to the historic center to see the Guadalajara’s sturdy, yellow cathedral and the stately old theater. That decision threw us a mini-detour, so we made our way back to the bus station via some backroads that had a lot of bodegas and fun Lucha Libre street art. In due time we made it back to the station, and caught the 4:00 bus that dropped us off at my parents’ front door by 5:30, just in time for dinner.