Our ride four hours northwest to San Miguel de Allende — SMA, wink, wink — will gather us at 1:00 so we wake late, pack, leave our bags at the front desk, and stroll the colonia (neighborhood). We brunch outside, bundled against serious morning chill at Cafe de la Fuego where Debra has a mocha she hasn’t stopped praising daily for a week and David has Eggs Benedict. Cynthia has the bright idea to get croissants, breakfast pastries and dinner bread at an artisan bakery around the corner, and Eduardo loads us and bags and bread into his Toyota Sienna. Adios Ciuidad!

At a roadside banio-break, we try to buy some tonic for our as-yet-untouched Hendricks but no one knows what we mean until a scruffy version of Travis Kelce tells us to ask for “agua quina.” Ain’t got. On to SMA where we will stay at the home-exchange home of Frank Thoms (teacher for 50 years, now writer) and Kathleen Cammarata (printmaker and painter). We’re met by Debra’s friend Beverly Van Zandt (not sister of Gus or Steven but cousin of Townes. Her distant grandfather is whom Van Zandt County, Texas, is named for), spend about five minutes trying to open the locked gate of the wrong house, and finally get into the extraordinary house and studio/gallery space that is our home for this coming week.

Frank Thoms, a teacher for 50 years, and his wife, Kathleen Cammarata, a print-maker and painter for about the same, hired a San Francisco architect to realize this compound, which they call Casa de Nueva Esperanza and, I guess, hope need not spring eternal here; it is fully realized in the moment.

The curvilinear glass and concrete two-story home and studio — and I do mean GLASS — is an architectural marvel, bringing in the outside in ways we find always fascinating but sometimes awkward. For example, though hard to see in the photos below, the living/kitchen area is separated from the master bedroom/bath area by glass walls with glass doors at both ends of a long, rectangular sitting room between them. This room is completely open on one side to a lovely inner courtyard. The room and the courtyard are both beautiful and welcoming places to sit, but since it has no wall other than roll-down shades on the courtyard side, we must make sure we keep the glass doors at both ends closed so insects and the morning chill do not have free access to either the living or sleeping areas. (Interestingly, the afternoon heat never seems to penetrate the house anywhere.) And, of course, the bed in the bedroom is like a stage when looked at from the living room. All ceilings are about 20-feet high.

We find fever tree agua quina in the fridge so G&Ts all around while we tour this concrete and glass wonder and Beverly drives us all to one of Debra’s fave restaurants: Hecho en Mexico, whose walls are adorned by the fanciful surrealist paintings of former Canadian figure skater Taylor Cranston.

Beverly is kind enough to drive us back downtown to our casa and we trundle to our beds. Cynthia and I on center stage and Debra up a long curving flight of outside stairs where she must go outside to reach her banio.