Saturday, March 21, 2009

Day 21 - Day 3 in Mexico

In the morning David headed off to find studs for the wheel, and I had a chance to see where I was in daylight. Beautiful fields with cattle grazing on my side of the road. I got out my good camera and took a few photos, shown here:





People (probably a dozen in all) came out of nowhere to take buses into town. Several came down the road to the bus stop, others crossed over from the village. I took the pictures above and below from the pedestrian walkway. There were cowboys in a far field, too distant to photograph.

A dog came sauntering down the side of the road, crossed over and walked along the barrier in the middle. I was sure she would be killed and couldn’t look, but she wasn’t. Don’t know where she went. Farm tractor came down the road, and turned at an opening in the median half a mile or so down. Meanwhile, traffic barrels past at 60 MPH +.

David got back with the studs at about 10, repaired the truck, and we were off again. As stated earlier, I was blessed, my worst fears were not realized. We pushed hard for the border, which closes for cargo traffic at 4, but did not make the 350 miles by then. The 350 miles were a mix of expressway and 3-lane, with quite a bit of construction thrown into the mix. There was very little traffic – the Guatemala traffic had turned of in Villahermosa, and the traffic for the upper Yucatan peninsula headed north there as well, or at Escarcega. From there onward it was traffic either for Belize, or Chetumal, Mexico.

We arrived at the border entrance at about 6 PM, parked our trucks in a yard that a private individual has where trucks park while waiting for the border to open. It’s fenced and watched over at night. Took a cab a short ride to a hotel a little closer to the border, took showers, and not finding a good restaurant David knew open nearby, took a cab into Chetumal and had dinner in a restaurant that caters to tourists. Cab ride was 9 miles, was 60 pesos, or about $4.35 US. David was still wearing his tee shirt from the night before, but we couldn’t find a tee shirt vendor, so hailed a cab back to the hotel, and got a good nights sleep.

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