One of the lessons you learn early on about living in a tin box on wheels is that your life becomes weather dependent. It’s not like boat living (and traveling) where every move is a chess game predicated on wind direction and strength but your quality of life in a vehicle is dictated by the seasons.
Winter in Mexico is ideal as it is the dry season -we’ve had three days of rain in five months and night time temperatures tend to drop low enough for good sleeping even after a long hot sunny day. However it is almost June and things are heating up. This weekend coastal Sonora is forecast to have daytime highs well above 100 degrees and the lab rats aboard GANNET2 are looking around trying to find a way out.
After a week wild camping at the beach we went into town yesterday and loaded up with food and fuel and water in Guaymas and pondered our options as we had fish tacos for lunch.
Guaymas isn’t so much a tourist town as it is a port and transportation hub. It has a rail line,
…and a Pemex fuel distribution center with a heap of tankers coming and going,
And a rather uninviting waterfront which we made an effort to visit so we could fool ourselves into thinking we had taken the full measure of the town. 
Neighboring San Carlos provides the upscale resort to the practical
commercial offerings of Guaymas so tourists and snowbirds flock across the bay to San Carlos where bilingualism is the order of the day. Guaymas is a Mexican town infiltrated by Walmart and Home Depot while retaining its commercial core.
None of this contemplation of the usefulness of Guaymas solved the essential dilemma of what to do with ourselves this heat wave weekend. Over all our deliberations lies the inevitable return to the north, so we are also forced to consider how we will wrap up this six month tour of Mexico.
Because it’s the weekend our wild camp will be invaded by picnic loving Mexicans and their delightful competing musical boom boxes to enjoy the peace and serenity of this superb beach so a strategic withdrawal seems a good plan.
Last January we were told of the delights of the small town of Alamos (“poplar trees”) and on our visit there we discovered a pleasant little town that seemed to have closed down. We wandered around disconsolately and left. We felt as though we failed to give it a chance to impress us so we decided over our tacos yesterday to take a three hour drive and have another go.
Alamos isn’t high enough in the mountains to be any cooler than the beach but there is a well shaded campground apparently with a pool and we can use that as either a hideaway from the heat or a base from which to try to discover more about the town every American snowbird loves to visit.
We will return to the beach at San Carlos in a few days and make an appointment to buy new tires at the Michelin dealer in Hermosillo where we had the tires aligned recently. The rough roads of our winter drive have played havoc with our alignment and we have some hidden tire wear so we will buy five Michelin Agilis tires and have them
installed in the land of inexpensive labor.
Then we will be ready to go north. Meanwhile we have this heatwave to get through, this portent of the summer to come. There’s no point in having a home on wheels if you don’t use them. We’d better get rolling.
