Traveling by van is my thought for the day. I was pondering our retirement choice as I sat in the shade at the Los Pinos RV park in Tepic in the great state of Nayarit. We have finally found the sun and we are packing away our winter clothes in the spaces under the bed. From here to the Andes I trust we shall be in summer.
It’s fifteen bucks a night in a grassy walled compound by ourselves with Eduardo the manager. The grass is thick and lush and there are no biting insects. It’s cool at night, the showers are hot and all we can hear is the rush of traffic outside the walls, not even dogs barking or loud music. It is an oasis of sorts.
Eduardo sweeps the fallen leaves around all the businesses at the entrance to the park, above, as I guess his boss owns the entire property. Rusty likes to go for a short walk morning and evening and I keep him on leash as the traffic is fierce. He drops his eggs, I pick them up and we meander back to GANNET2 on his schedule. He really enjoys the grass.
It is a surprisingly zen kind of life and I have been ploughing through my kindle e reader. The latest is a book recommended by Webb Chiles, himself an avid reader, this book on the subject of the Mexican revolution, a novel that talks in terms of Mexico a century ago, a place more familiar in literature than modern Mexico.
The drive along the coast to Tepic was a particularly long day starting at 7:30 in the morning leaving Las Glorias after putting out my last pile of food for the stray dogs living by the dumpster, and ending after dark at Los Pinos in Tepic.
Highway 15D (D for “Directo” designates a toll road) is the main road from Nogales down the Pacific Coast to Tepic where it turns inland to Guadalajara ending in Mexico City. It’s the main road but the surface is totally dependent on the funding from, and commitment of the states. In Sinaloa most of it is crap. Enjoy the potholes!
Or the randomly placed vibradores designed to slow you down by rattling your teeth and testing your suspension and interior furniture on their steel buttons placed in the road. Most places they mark dangerous curves or likely pedestrian crossings but in Sinaloa they are random:
Then there are random pedestrians or horses or slow unlit motorcycles or animals. Or lumbering rattletrap vehicles driving 25 miles an hour.
Do not drive at night; chances are you will hit something or someone.
Daily life is lived by the side of the highway.
Maybe a farmer checking his crop?
And for this endless tolls. Lots of them. In one day we paid $70 to drive highway 15D. You’ll meet people who make a point of avoiding the “cuotas” (toll roads) because they want to see “authentic” Mexico but if you want to cover ground in this vast country this is the way to drive. You’ll get plenty of back road Mexico later.
We’ve seen some crashes on Highway 15D. Oddly the trucks we’ve passed were overturned at the side of the highway along empty straight stretches as though their overworked drivers fell asleep at the wheel. We came upon a group of cars that crashed in the mountains during the rain, as we closed in on Tepic through a stretch full of bends. Speed and inattention to weather were to blame I expect but no one was hurt.
I love the magic third lane in Mexico where slow vehicles like us ride the shoulder and everyone else gets a move on at their pace, no stress and no road rage.
We’re driving the shoulder so oncoming traffic can take the magic third lane if they feel like it. The box truck below is starting to pass the 18 wheeler:
We saw evidence of the recent battles between angry narco- traffickers and the military. I tried but got only a fuzzy picture of burned out trucks at the weigh station where Sinaloa State meets Nayarit:
It’s not normal: other truckers waiting in line to be inspected had their cell phones out taking pictures of the wreckage. I held up my Lumix GX85 and snapped as we flew by. We took a break at a truck stop where we bought five dollar regular gas. This year the peso is strong and gas is expensive. You remember the book I mentioned about Mexico a hundred years ago? That image is a bit out of date here.
Rusty walks unmolested by dogs and ignored by truck drivers.
Highway 15D is more than a freeway, as modern as it may look sometimes. Its also where people live and work, it’s how they get home to their shacks pushing wheelbarrows of firewood or riding horses that are cheaper to operate than motorcycles. Poverty is everywhere here and sometimes that glimpse of 19th century Mexico shows through in the middle of the modern supply chain superhighway. Sinaloa also has crappy bus stops along the road acknowledging the need many people have to get about by public transport.
Motorcycles are everywhere and some people are wealthy enough to buy and use the required helmets.
Tolls are paid in cash and though some use electronic passes I’m not an early adopter so I’ll leave that electronic trickery to travelers braver than I.
Pay in pesos…don’t be clueless! Get at least a few hundred dollars in pesos from your bank before you arrive because ATMs do require some learning to use effectively but unlike Baja where the economy survives in pleasing Americans, this is real Mexico and they expect you to understand that. Apparently some foreigners still try it on:
No gate crashing at road works either please. Despite stereotypes Mexican drivers are polite and most often don’t take cuts. Get in line and be patient.
And at the end of the rainbow of Highway 15D we find Tepic, land of Wally World and blueberries and trash bags and UHT milk. Webb teases me about shopping American but we do both American and Mexican shopping as you will see. We live in our van and we aren’t on vacation so we like to retreat to our own home of an evening, and surround ourselves with the familiar to avoid the burnout of endless travel. I love traveling in my own home.
It was a long day of driving. We got to the campground after dark. Luckily we knew where it was, I’d never have attempted to find it at night unless we’d been there before. Remember no driving at night? It’s creepy even in town and my eyes were like saucers as we followed Google maps’ blue line. Invisible Pedestrians!
We could all use a rest.
