Hotel Southern Nights

“You aren’t going to believe this,” I said to Layne when I got back to the van. “I just threw the toilet paper down the bowl.” 

She didn’t believe it in point of fact. We haven’t flushed toilet paper since we were in Laredo September 25th when we crossed into Mexico land of the toilet paper basket.

It’s weird what strikes at the heart of your journey sometimes. Finding a fully equipped RV campground near Rivas in southern Nicaragua was a shock to us. The iOverlander notes said it was owned by an American and we figured it would be some hippy surfer type. Ron actually looks like a buff trucker in a white t shirt and jeans and he runs a tight ship. 

It’s a lush tropical garden with cement pads to park on, electricity powerful enough to charge our batteries (but not to run the air conditioning directly).  He has cold showers and they are sparkling clean. Notice the bright clear labels!

He even has a dump for your black tank, the first we’ve seen since Oaxaca in Mexico! Layne laments the lack of a swimming pool but I enjoyed washing Rusty’s bed at the sink provided and using the cement pads to dry out our camping gear that got damp in recent rains. 

It’s just that some days you want order in your life and to find it in the little port town of San Jorge on the shore of Lake Nicaragua was perfect for us. Doug recently mentioned in the comments the fresh water sharks of the lake but I’ve never seen them so I’d better get the book he mentioned by Randy Wayne White a Florida author whose books I have enjoyed. 

Ron told us he has spent 18 years in Central America including a stint in Honduras. Apparently he was a jockey early in life racing in Hialeah and he also did some rodeo rides and he has pictures to prove it. 

The humidity was helped along by an afternoon rain storm which we sat out aboard GANNET2 withbthe air conditioning running watch a couple of episodes of the Bosch detective series on Prime streaming. I enjoy the interludes of shutting out the world in our van, it charges my batteries and gives me a little time back in the world I used to know and gives me a break from being on the road. 

The plan is to drive around Lake Nicaragua avoiding Managua the capital and drive inland to cross at a quiet border not often used by commercial trucking which sticks to the faster PanAmerican Highway near the coast. 

I’m hoping for some beach camping on Costa Rica’s indented coast. Everyone says Costa Rica is unnaturally expensive compared to its neighbors, a state of affairs created by a huge influx of North American escapees and retirees they say. I will be interested to see how the country has changed since we sailed there in 1999. 

And there we shall wait to see if Panama calms down and the roads open to traffic. Visa requirements mean that if we decide to go north we have until January 16th to get back to Mexico. If Panama doesn’t reopen we may have no choice.