Catching Up

Our friends Chris and Juan arrived on Thursday and parked one space over from us. Tables and chairs were set up and we caught up on each other's life for the past year. They report that things are slowly getting better in Monterrey, enough that they now feel more comfortable leaving their home to travel more. Juan is tied up in completing his Doctorate and Chris has had a few contracts that have taken him on short trips around Mexico. They are looking forward to retirement when they want to do some extensive RVing in Mexico.

We have developed a propane leak near the propane tank. Norma noticed the smell and when I checked the level, I found we had lost a quarter of a tank in a little over a day. It started just after we had it filled so I think something happened then that loosened a fitting somewhere. The smell was quite strong in the bay where the tank is but I was unable to find the leak with my soapy water solution. Chris, who is fluent in Spanish, is talking to people trying to find a mechanico who will come to the park to do repairs. We have to have the tank turned on in order for the fridge to operate while we are driving so it is important to get this repaired. Chris and Juan have a small leak in their oven that they will have repaired at the same time.

Later today we all want to go down to the Centro here in Saltillo. We will wander around and find a nice place to eat. Life is good!

Saltillo

We are safe and sound in Saltillo after an uneventful 250 KM drive. The directions in the Church’s guide to the Imperial Hotel and RV Park are a little confusing to say the least! This may have been partly my fault as I tried to let the GPS assist me as well as Norma reading the directions. I probably should have just turned the GPS off. We ended up driving past the turnoff while looking for their landmarks. As soon as we did this the lady in the GPS started complaining and telling me to make a u-turn. I did this (divided highway) and the first exit was the street the hotel was on. From then it was simple.

We checked in and paid $350 pesos per day for five days. There is no weekly rate and the RV rate posted on the wall actually reads $460 pesos per day! I guess that is just there to keep undesirables out. We can always add a couple of days later.

Our friends will arrive tomorrow. There is one other motorhome in the park. It is a couple from Minnesota who read this Blog! They are just on their way down to the Yucatan.

Las Palmas Hotel, Matehuala

It was a short drive today from San Louis Potosi to Matehuala. We are meeting our friends Chris and Juan in Saltillo but they are delayed by having to make a quick trip up to the USA. This gives us a little extra time.

Matehuala is just a few kilometers north of the Tropic of Cancer. This is a significant marker for me because it tells me that I am really on my way home. I love the Tropics and I think my body and personality are suited for life in the Tropics. I may have been born at the wrong latitude!

We really like the Las Palmas! It is right on the Old Highway 57 that Matehuala is built on. The sign is huge and can be seen from far away. It is a very old sign, reminiscent of the old Route 66 signs.  Out back of the Hotel is the RV park which is really just a gravel parking lot with hookups. The water is good, the pressure is good, the electric is good and there are plenty of sewer connections. There are also spotless showers with tons of hot water. Everything works. Only seasoned Mexico travelers will appreciate this.

The hotel has a great restaurant. It is not cheap by Mexican standards but it is by Canadian standards. We went tonight and our meals were great. I had shrimp enchiladas and Norma had ham steak. With a glass of house wine each, the bill was $345 pesos or $27. The waiters are very good, they are dressed in tuxedos, the tables have white tablecloths and the silverware is actually silver (plated anyway). I once said something nice about the restaurant on RV.net and got the immediate response that it was too expensive for Mexico.  In my opinion, it is not. It is good value for the money.

One funny thing though. We are getting close to the border so they have English menus for English speaking customers and most of the waiters know at least a little English. I surprised them by ordering off the English menu in Spanish! The waiter thought that was pretty good!

Blogger Question

Blogger (Google) seems to have done some changes recently. One, they have assigned a .mx suffex to my address, I guess because they have detected I am posting from Mexico. I hope this will change when I cross the border.

Second and more important, the quick edit "pencil" icon has disappeared from below my posts. This means I have to go through extra steps to edit a post. I Googled this problem and it is fairly common (mostly in Australia) with no simple fixes being offered. Have any other Blogger users had this problem?

Arco Norte to San Louis Potosi

Today was a much better driving day! The Arco Norte is a great road, only showing wear in a few little places. It has a 110 KPH speed limit and I kept it at a pretty steady 95, good for putting the miles, oops, kilometres, behind us.

We stopped at a roadside stand near San Miguel de Allende for a cup of fresh strawberries and real cream each and also to purchase a years supply of strawberry pancake syrup and jam.

From there it was a clear shot to San Lois Potosi where we are parked in a huge Pemex truck stop. There is a Church's Chicken and a Papa John.s Pizza attached so that was where we ate. You can tell we are getting close to the border!

We are about 500 KM from Saltillo where we will stay in an RV park for a couple of nights and where we shall meet our friends from Monterrey. We really enjoy the short times we get to visit with Chris and Juan. We will have fun trading stories!

The check engine light is still on but if you read the comments from yesterday you will see it is a common problem for the V-10 and not one which many people worry too much about.

 

Pemex to Arco Norte

We are not really sure where last night's Pemex was. Somewhere just west of Minatitlan on Mex 150D. We got up at 8:00, filled up the gas and headed out, thinking we would find a restaurant for breakfast. Such was not the case and we went most of the long day just sharing a fruit salad we bought at a roadside stand. The road was really bad! This is the stretch that destroyed the dolly fender on the way down in January. However, I think the road in the direction we took today is in slightly better shape. The left lane had been resurfaced for part of the distance and I drove on it until each time I noticed a vehicle coming up behind me when I moved over to let him pass. The canned goods are tumbled around in the cupboard and the bedroom closet is a little messed but not too bad considering the jarring we took. Norma says to tell you that the whole state of Veracruz is just one pothole after another!

Once past Cordoba we got into the steep climb and switchbacks. This is my least favorite stretch of road in Mexico. The V-10 was really working and somewhere along the way the "Check Engine" light came on and was still on when we parked tonight. I cannot feel anything wrong in the way it drives and it starts and stops fine. If it is still on in the morning I will treat it to a tank of premium gas and see what happens. Oh yes, tolls today were $95 and two fillups of gas was about $160, thanks to the cheap gas in Mexico. My normal budget control rule is to never gas up more than once a day but today we needed to put some miles on.

We are arranging to meet up with our Mexican friends Chris and Juan somewhere north of here and if the light is still on then I will have one of them come to a ford dealer with me to translate and I will try to get the problem resolved in Mexico where it will cost pesos instead of dollars.

My other problem is that my pair of four year old six volt golf cart batteries that power the RV is packing it in. They used to be able to carry the inverter and the added on bar fridge for at least a couple of hours if we stopped for lunch or whatever. Now after only a few minutes the voltage is down below 12 volts and the inverter alarms and cuts out. We will work with these batteries until we get to a Sam's Club in the USA and can replace them there. I doubt if these ones will be worth saving for the workshop at home. I think they are shot.

Anyway, enough mental wandering! We are on the Arco Norte (Mexico City bypass) in a Pemex (actually the only Pemex on the 140 KM highway). We are at about 8000 feet. I remembered that when the generator faltered trying to carry two fridges, two computers, various phone and battery chargers and the microwave all at the same time. It is set up for sea level and will not handle the big loads way up here at 8000 feet! One thing at a time and it is fine. On the Arco Norte, Life is Good!

You Say Pollo…

We walked over to the little restaurant in the Pemex last night for dinner. We were the only customers and, as is usual in Mexico, the place looked and smelled spotless. Every one of the six or seven tables had a fresh tablecloth on it and the tile floor gleamed.

The well dressed young waiter brought us a menu. There was little on it for a non meat eater like me but I quickly spotted a tuna salad and vegetable soup. There were actually several soups offered but right at the top of the list was plain “sopa vegetal”, followed by the next soup on the list, “sopa vegetal con pollo”. I read the first to him and in meticulous handwriting he wrote  down  “sopa vegetal con pollo”.  I said “no pollo” and  he went into a long spiel in Spanish that I could not follow.  I pointed to the entry on the menu and again said “no pollo”  and he again went into his spiel.  I told him to forget the soup and to just bring me the tuna salad, “Ensalada de Atun”.

At this point Norma got mad at me for giving up and took over the ordering of my soup. I gave up listening because there was an obvious failure to communicate but soon they both nodded and she said he understood. Well, maybe not so much because I got my nice tuna salad accompanied by a large bowl of chicken soup.

Pronunciation is very important in Spanish and I was pronouncing pollo as “polo” (like in the horseback game), where the actual pronunciation is “poyo”. I guess this was the problem, he had no idea what I was talking about and was used to everyone ordering the chicken variety of soup. Earlier, Norma walked into the same restaurant and asked to see the menu. The woman who was there at the time told her there was no menu even though there was a pile if them on the counter. Norma picked one up and the woman laughed and told her the correct pronunciation, which sounded pretty close to our pronunciation but obviously not close enough.

Anyway, all ended well, I got my tuna salad and Norma ate the soup. I suspect he was telling us they had no plain vegetable soup and was recommending the chicken variety. Oh well, another night in Mexico. The Pemex was very quiet all night. Life here is a little confusing at times but Good!

Photos: You may have noticed a lack of Photos on the Blog recently. Now both computers are refusing to recognize the photo card. I am working on the problem and have been advised to remove the batteries for a time to let everything reset.

Howling Good Time

The Howler Monkeys were really having a great time at Palenque! They start up at dusk and have great conversations across the treetops. Individually they sound like a hoarse dog bark but add them all together and it is something between a lion’s roar and the sound of heavy traffic. Very hard to describe, you have to hear it. Now there is an idea! All of you come to the Mayabell in Palenque and listen to the monkeys!

We got away fairly early this morning. We were supposed to leave yesterday but we got tangled up with a great couple of real estate salesmen from Chico, CA and some beer and tequila and etc., etc.. We did not feel like driving the next morning!

The road to Villahermosa was not very good. Lots of construction, dirt and gravel.  Once again we drove straight down the highway through Villahermosa. We have been told this is illegal for dual wheel vehicles. We are supposed to use the periferico which is in really bad shape and would take at least an hour instead of the fifteen minutes on the highway.
About an hour out of Villahermosa, traffic ground to a halt, moving slowly in a single lane. We soon saw the problem. A tractor pulling two huge trailers of Tecate beer had overturned in the median! Thousands of cases of bottled beer had dumped and were being picked up and stacked while two wreckers were trying to pull the truck and trailers out of the ditch. They stopped traffic for this and we were at the front of the line to watch the show.
This set us back a good hour so we did not make it as far as we had hoped. This is the stretch where our Alaskan friends were hijacked a couple of weeks ago but this being yet another holiday in Mexico, the road is very busy, not a good time for pistol packing banditos.

We are stopped in a busy Pemex station that is open all night. It is well lit and well used so we will be safe here. It is 99F so the generator is running and the A/C is trying to cool us down. There is a restaurant here that we will try soon. We will tip the guard when he shows up. Life is good!

Palenque, And It Is HOT!

We just pulled into Palenque's Mayabell PV park and it is HOT! 104F in the shade! The power is good enough to run the A/C on low so that is what it is doing. I am not sure if we will go to the ruins. It is very uncomfortable walking and climbing in this heat and we have seen them twice before.

The drive here was fine. Two hundred and some kilometers of secondary road, much of it under construction. We picked up a little mud when they over-watered one section of dirt. We will just hang around in the motorhome until the music starts in the palapa restaurant that is on the grounds. They have good music every night and the food is always great. After that we will listen to the Howler Monkeys in the trees around the park.

Chetumal To Escarcega

We finally got away from Chetumal! It has been just over a month and it was really nice there. The weather was pretty much perfect although it did rain a couple of times. The rain, when it came, only lasted for a few minutes to an hour and then the sun came back out.

We took MX 186 that cuts across the Yucatan almost directly to Palenque. It is a little too far for a day so we stopped overnight half way.

On the way here though a couple of things happened. We went through an Aduana (Customs) checkpoint. A nice guy in uniform but very efficient. He pointed at the motorhome’s VIN tag and asked for the importation papers. This has never happened to us before. We showed him the papers for both the MH and the Mazda and he waved us through.

A few miles up the road we came to an army checkpoint. They had a pickup in front of us stopped and were really going through it. The had the seats tipped up and were searching under and behind them. It was finally our turn and we expected the same treatment. Instead a nice looking young Mayan Marine came to the window and asked if we spoke Spanish. As we do in all these cases, we said no. We have found if we tell them we know a little then they launch into rapid Spanish that we cannot follow and that makes them think we are being evasive, so we always say “no”.

He looked at our passports and with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “Good, then we can speak Mayan”! He then spoke a sentence in Mayan, we all laughed and he waved us on. This has been our experience in every case with the Mexican Army. They are alert for telltale signs but friendly to us old Canadians!

We had checked the Churches book for a place to stay near Escarcega and drove to the “Restaurante Bar Familiar Maya Campestre” at KM 52 east of Escarcega. The parking is free, all they ask is that you buy a meal at the restaurant. It was 97F when we parked. We went for a late lunch / early dinner and then retreated into the motorhome with the generator and air conditioning running. There are many chickens, roosters, peacocks and one shy dog running around so I suspect we will be up early!

Well, the sound of the Karaoke machine drew us back to the restaurant. The small place was full of locals and we had a blast. We drank three litres of beer, ate a large plate of french fries, danced with Mayans and watched a floor show of flaming baton throwing! It was a lot of fun, all for $151 pesos or about $12 dollars!  It is now 10:00 PM,  it is 81F and it is pitch black outside.  Every star in the sky is putting on a show. Life is Good!