ODO: 315,955
It was time to start our “leaving town resupply”: groceries, water (this time we had to flush our tank before we refilled it), and any other small errands. We couldn’t get started until mid day because KoKo had a meeting. That’s right, we’re still doing our bay area job, just at a much less intense pace. One of our other errands involved trying to get our inverter replaced or fixed. We found a dealer in town for the brand we have, but after some back and forth they no showed us. We were very out of practice doing our resupply, and it ended up taking us all day to finish, so we chose to spend another night rather than drive out in the dark. We decided to try the hotel restaurant and it was amazing. Top floor, very fancy, and all to ourselves! Probably because we showed up at 10pm. We had a tableside stroganoff and left with some delicious cake.
The next morning we picked up a few more groceries, and finally managed to leave town heading south. We drove along the coast checking out all the beaches, finally settling on one north of La Manzanilla. It was a spit of land that poked out into the ocean, so we had a water view out of both windows. Now came the hard part, remembering how exactly we lived out of this thing. Where was all the kitchen stuff? Why does this live in this drawer? How do I even open this? We made a fast easy dinner of cup of noodles and carrot sticks to ease ourselves back in. As the sun went down dozens of tiny crabs came out to forage for food on the sand. While we were trying to figure out our next move, the weather changed from lovely to tropical storm warning. We had been keeping tabs on Beryl’s progress towards the Yucatan, and were unsure if we would catch any of the fall out. Luckily by morning the storm warning was gone. Oh, and it was the 4th of July, which Mexico does not celebrate, so it was a very quiet night.
Packing up was an adventure too. Is this where that goes? How does this thing close? Does this need to be locked? We picked a beach about five hours away and headed out. The truck picked up an electrical gremlin mid day. The engine would turn off for a second and turn back on, we were not fans. But we kept driving while trying to figure it out. We crossed out of the state of Jalisco into Colima, aka Banana Country.
One of the interesting things about the truck is that if you unlock it and open the back passenger door, the truck does not always acknowledge it, and will relock all the doors like you didn’t open a door in time. I’m sure you can guess how KoKo learned this. Luckily someone hid a spare under the truck for just such an occasion! To set the record straight, this is the second time KoKo has locked keys in a car in her driving life. Back on the road, we headed into Manzanillo to see if we could find some parts to chase away our new electrical gremlin, but the AutoZones did not have what we needed. Next we crossed into the state of Michoacan where we drove through an OCEAN of bananas. Both sides of the road, as far as the eye could see, bananas. We drove until we managed to find a beach campground that wasn’t weirdly deserted or had a weird vibe before settling in for the night.
The coastline here is dotted with tiny towns with nicely paved roads and “jug gas” gas stations. The whole area has the feel of “used to be nice/fancy”, like they maybe weren’t able to recover from the last hurricane they experienced. As we drove, the banana gave way to papaya. At one point we came across road construction just in time to see them dynamite the cliff next to the road. It sounded like a bad car accident and smelled like gun powder. This time of year is extremely hot and humid along the coast, it was not like this when we left, so this was quite the surprise. Our goal with checking out all these beaches was trying to find a place we could get in the water, but the Pacific is gnarly. Very steep, crashing waves, rocks, not the most inviting. Our other option to beat the heat was to head inland, which we did to both beat the heat and avoid the cartel warnings around Acapulco. We hopped on our first toll road, which was lovely and very expensive. We made it up into the mountains and found a hot springs resort where we could spend the night. The place was full of fireflies, but we couldn’t find anyone official to confirm it was ok for us to stay there, so we had a not very restful night. It didn’t help that it was still hot, but much less humid. Somewhere along the drive into the mountains (foreshadowing) the truck started making a knocking sound along with a terrible plastic-y screeching sound from time to time. Maybe we shouldn’t have left the truck alone for so long….
We were up and on the road before the hot springs resort opened for the day so no hot springs for us. Plus, it’s very warm up here so we didn’t want to. We made our way down the toll road to Capula, the epicenter for the Catrina Doll, which Berne is obsessed with. We wandered through the market looking at all the different dolls and sampling the local tamales. Each doll is hand made and hand painted, and not nearly expensive enough. We came across some 5 foot tall dolls that were in the $150USD-$300USD range. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how to get a pair of them home, but didn’t come up with any good solutions. After that we began our tour of AutoZone’s in this area to see if one had the relay we wanted to try. We got one installed, so now we wait…We found another hot springs resort to camp for the night and decided to get off the toll road to get there. The not-toll road turned out to be an adventure. It was similar to a forest service road, and then we came across a big rock in our path. We were able to roll it out of the way, but a little further down the road we came across a downed tree. The bank had collapsed beneath it sending it across the “road”. We broke out our mini saw, and many heavy breathing minutes later (we were doing this at 8500ft), we had it off to the side of the road as well. We got permission to camp this time (we paid the fee), and were the only people in a giant field that turned out to be full of fireflies again! We did a little more reorganizing, made some dinner and climbed into bed. It was pretty chilly, which felt fantastic after the past few days.
We woke up to chilly (50F) mountain weather and got to driving. Our destination was the town of Tula de Allende because it looks like they have some cool Toltec ruins in the area. Starting now we are mostly on an archeological tour of Mexico. We thought we had a cool campground lined up, but it turned out to be a bust, not a single remotely flat spot, so we decided to find a hotel near the ruins we wanted to see. Still no resolution to our weird noises inside the cab, and we haven’t found our gremlin yet.
In the morning we headed out to the Zona Arqueologica de Tula to see some ruins. This was the second pyramid on our pyramid tour of Mexico. We climbed what was left of a pyramid to see the remaining statues and carvings. Sweating from the sun and our quick pace around the park, we got back on the road and headed to a close campground for a few days of rest and catching up on some truck/camper maintenance.
