Teotihuacán.

This week’s Outbound Train flies to the pyramids of Teotihuacán near Mexico City. Since this week’s issue has a Mexican accent to it, I thought this would be fitting.

Seeing these pyramids has been a lifelong dream of mine, which finally came true on a family vacation last summer. We set aside an entire day for the pre-Colombian ruins of Teotihuacán. We were going to take a bus, but fate intervened and gave us a private car. The evening before our planned trip to the pyramids, we were in a cab going back to the hotel after dinner and our driver said hey, if you want to see the pyramids tomorrow, I’ll take you for the entire day. His price was no more than the price of the roundtrip tickets on the bus, so we arranged for him to pick us up the following morning.

Bright and early the next day, he picked us up at our hotel and drove us out to the pyramids. And we thought Parisians drove dangerously!

With me squished in the backseat with the three kids and Andy happily chatting away with the driver in the front seat, we watched Mexico City go from urban cityscape to mountain-covered cement slum towns to a country landscape that looks a lot like the mother country, Spain.

When we were almost to the pyramids, the driver suggested that he take us to a maguey beverage factory. He told us that the maguey is a plant that makes a very special Mexican beverage. A beverage believed to have great powers. It makes men strong and women fertile. He told us that construction workers drink it everyday for lunch. We had never heard of such a magical beverage. Would we like to stop and sample this beverage? Me, no, of course not because I want to see the pyramids! No time to dilly dally here. But Andy says yes, of course, we’d love for you to show us this magical maguey drink.

So the taxi takes a little detour and pulls into what looks like someone’s private house. A nice woman comes out to greet us and asks where we are visiting from. France, the kids answer. She starts speaking in terrible, very thickly accented French. No, we’re from the U.S., we interrupt over her Franish monologue, but anticipating that her English would be just as bad, we asked her to speak Spanish. We learned that the maguey, which you might think is a cactus but most definitely is not, is a treasured Mexican plant and has a gazillion different uses, ranging from ancient cesarean sections to beverages to textiles. We got to walk out in the maguey field for a full demonstration of how to tear out the insides of the plant.

After a lecture about the maguey, we were invited to come inside to taste this magical beverage. We follow our guide inside and then out again to a very pretty courtyard to what looks like a small bar. The woman set out five shot glasses. This didn’t strike us as odd because we were still naïve enough not to have figured out what the maguey drink is yet. The nice woman pulls out a bottle of what looks like liquor from beneath the bar and quickly fills up the five shot glasses. Excuse me, says Andy, but is there any alcohol in that? No, she tells us. Are you sure? Yes. Because, you know, it looks like it might . . . have . . . some. We’re trying to look at the bottle label to read it and, at the same time, trying to keep the kids from drinking it without being rude to our hosts by just outright taking the drinks away from our kids. But we couldn’t read the bottle and by now our 5-year-old, Maya, is little miss bottoms up with what turned out to be pulque. Pulque is an ancient native American beverage. An alcoholic beverage.

Next comes a second beverage. This one, she tells us, has a little bit of alcohol, but it’s good for the kids and pours another five shot glasses full. This one definitely looks like tequila, but she says it’s not. Drink number two was Mezcal and had more alcohol than pulque, but less than tequila. Maya is again bottoms up. She’s always eager to please by trying new foods, even while we’re gently coaxing her not to.

Finally comes the bottle of tequila. Andy puts his hands over the glasses—I think that’s probably enough for the kids, he says. Just the adults this time, please. If you insist, but it’s very good for their health, the woman says.

To be honest, the two younger kids did not have any alcohol, so they were sober. Maya had two shots of the light stuff and was sober enough. Besides, she can handle it. She regularly guzzles down salsa picante, garlic and anything else we throw at her. We can now add alcoholic Aztec drinks to that list. And if she was a little drunk, let’s just call it a learning experience.

We eventually did make it to the pyramids and even climbed them. Going up was the easy part; getting back down was really hard. Maya recommends throwing back a few shots of tequila beforehand to take the edge off.

Our unexpected detour for the toddler tequila tasting turns out to have been the most memorable part of the daytrip and this will surely be one of those legendary family stories that we tell again and again to embarrass Maya for the rest of her life.