Day 21 - Victoria to Guanajuato, MX

Odometer: 125,195 Weather: cloudy but increasingly sunny and HOT

After breakfast, we packed up and looked again at the map. Gertie (GPS) seems to be a bit confused and won’t let us enter streets, only Lat & Long coordinates. We decide we’ll try and follow highway signs and maps and see where it leads.
By 10 am we are starting through the Sierra Madre Mountains and it’s beautiful..NOTE TO SELF: get the movie Treasure of Sierra Madre with Humphrey Bogart….It’s also a bit like stepping back in time. Like the Rocky Mountains, it’s difficult to imagine the effort that went in to building this highway (which is very good). There are numerous small towns and I wish so badly that I could speak Spanish so that I could converse with some of these people and learn about their lives. Understand…there is no industry—nothing around for miles and miles to employ them. There is no ‘old age pension’. We’re told some of the states in Mexico provide a small allowance—I’m guessing like our welfare.The soil is powdery sand…what can possibly grow here? How do they manage to maintain even the lowest standard of living…I don’t know, but I wish I did. There are lots of ‘cantinas’ where many of the huge transport trucks stop for lunch or a break but the majority of the ‘town’ is small, one room cinder-block houses with no doors or glass in the windows and nothing in the yard to indicate they own much else. NOTE TO SELF: sign up for Spanish lessons.
I mention in the last blog that we are a bit tired. Most of that (I think) is the stress of driving through the interior of Mexico. We have not (as yet) been at all concerned about our safety, either in the RV park or on the road. However, because there is a language issue and there are virtually few/no signs to indicate what highway you are on, we are trying to coordinate where we are with any one of 5 different books, maps, internet printouts, etc. plus find RV parks at towns we will be passing close to. As previously mentioned, the interior of Mexico is not as widely traveled by RV so while there are gazillions of very big, modern, nice parks along the coasts, they are few and far between where we are and want to go. We will often pick a spot on the map that we want for a destination only to find no RV parks listed for that city. We realize now that if we want to see something specific in a particular place, we will probably have to stay in a hotel…and that’s okay.
All the books say not to drive at night with very good reason. Even the most modern highway will have herds of goats (untethered), cows and horses (sometimes tethered) a virtual 8” dropoff on the shoulder. Put it all together and it’s potential disaster. Day driving is very pleasant and the toll road we are on today is a la Hwy 401. It’s cost us $4 to go…we don’t know how far. We turn off the roll road to a main secondary road which will take us to our destination and things change rapidly. The road is well paved but as Wayne says below, there is a huge drop-off on each side…no shoulder, and because I sit virtually over that non-shoulder, I was ready to pass out a few times. Unlike a lot of passengers, I don’t scream or yell, I just sit quietly and wait for death! It is getting late and I’m trying to imagine doing this drive in the dark…no way, not possible, can’t be done. I’m also thinking about the hundreds (literally) crosses, markers, and shrines, we’ve passed along the road marking where people have died. By the time we get to our RV park, I’m beyond help and telling Wayne that the next stop is a hotel…any hotel. But the fun hasn’t ended yet….see below:

(Wayne’s blog: Bless her heart; Lynne is able to sleep through my early morning risings allowing me to do whatever turns my crank. This is a quiet morning to enjoy after a long drive yesterday finding the one available campground. We ended our 500 KM drive with 100 Km of driving over well paved narrow roads with a significant flaw of no shoulders and a foot and a half to a two foot drop if you veered off the crooked narrow road. I had to slow to 60 Km to drive carefully towards our destination. We met lots of local buses wanting more than their share of the road. I could not see Lynne’s knuckles but I am guessing they were white as she sat very quietly beside me.

Looking outside as the dawn broke, I could see the mountains, the reddish looking sky above where the sun was going to rise and a cluster of clouds on the horizon in front of and below the peaks of the mountains. It looks like we will have a great day to explore the city.

As I was sitting there looking at the myriad books we have on traveling in Mexico I heard a disturbing sound. -In a perfect world with a perfect RV you sort of expect 24 hour 7 day a week performance of the mobile worthiness as well as the mobile home worthiness. As we all know and learn each passing day real life does not work that way-. I could hear water dripping somewhere. It was not the sink. It was not the shower. Yep. The toilet was quietly overflowing. I pushed on the foot pedal for the trap door and nothing happened. The holding tank had quietly filled up during the night. Water was starting to run out onto the cabin floor. I rushed outside to shut off the camp site water valve and because this camp ground had no sewer hookup, I had to open the drain valve and let the torrential flood of water from the tank flow over the water starved grass. I came back inside expecting to find Lynne fully awake. But no she was still sleeping soundly. Luckily because we vowed to only use the toilet for number 1 there were only a couple of pees fully diluted with a black water holding tank full of fresh water. I suspect that because there was such a low pressure from the external tap, there was not enough pressure to close the foot valve. We will find out if that is true at some future point. end of Wayne’s addition.