When I update this blog, I copy yesterday's new over to the Google Blog thing and then write today's whatever into my site here. I got a surprise tonight when I went to copy over yesterdays text. All the Google Blog info is in Spanish! Google must pick up that I'm coming through a Mexican IP address and switch the language over! Good thing I've been using this for a long time and can use it without looking!
Well, today was an exciting day. We crossed the border from Arizona into Mexico first thing this morning. EVERYONE warned us of how terrible it would be and more so, how dangerous. "Buy a gun." "Buy a machete". "Don't stop at anytime for anything" All great advice from all of our friends who love us, but really just scared the crap out of us. (Almost literally, but that's a story for sitting around the bar to tell!)
We got to the border at Nogales. A horrid little town that looks, well, it looks exactly like the sort of killer village that we all saw all of our lives in the movies. We were pretty sure that everyone's warnings were exactly right at that point.
Oddly, the dude at the border they asked if we had insurance and when we showed him our policy that we'd bought the day before, he told us to drive 21k down the road and check with the immigration folks.
Drive 21k? Yup - this is going to be an experience for sure. We drove to immigration, got our visas and our car sticker and were out of there after a somewhat confusing, disorganized 45 minutes.
That was the end of the weirdness for us. We drove about 600k today and are in the town of Cuidad Obregon tonight. We found a beautiful hotel where "Yes" they have a guard outside all night watching the cars.
We did see a few border patrol army type folks out on the road. We found it odd that at one of the gas stations along the way, they would not accept US cash! (I thought the entire WORLD wanted that!)
The roads were great. We drove the toll roads where it seems to be costing about $10.00 US at each of the 3 we drove today.
The countryside is nice. None of the majestic beauty of the Rocky's, or the Redwood Forest of the Red Rock mountains in Arizona. The desert seemed more sandy. Lot's of Cactus, beautiful blue sky's again. There was the odd cloud. (Yesterday was the first day we'd seen any cloud in the sky for about a week. The temperature was in the high 30's most of the day. It seems to have only dropped down to the high 20's tonight. I did just check the weather back home. :-(
I don't know if I've mentioned this in the Blog or not, but we have a bit of a change of destination at the moment, or a new layover anyway.
Lynne was searching for blog's the other night from folks who have driven all the way down here and ended up on a site about a town in Mexico called Lake Chapala. Weather is great. Cost of living - excellent. Big expat community. So . . . . now, after almost 5 weeks on the road and closing on on 9000k, we're going to be in Lake Chapala this weekend and probably staying there through the Christmas holidays.
We're both getting really tired of driving. Beautiful sights just blend together after a while. I can't wait to unpack the car and see what's in there. We need to get to a place soon so that we can book a ticket for Jordan to come visit over Christmas so, unless we get there and don't like it, it looks like we're going to stop driving and adventure around there for a while. We found a great spot online tonight to start from. If it is a good when we get there as it appears on their site, we may just stay in one of the two bedroom villas for a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.