Tuesday July 6th and Wednesday July 7th, 2010

Tuesday was a rat race. Ross left at 10 am to go with Dick, Larry, Christie and Miguel (head of tourism for the Bahia Banderas) to a campo that is on the beach and shouldn’t be. There are 5 or 6 guys living in makeshift houses (Palm fronds and an old catamaran (hobie cat) with no sails or mast, just a piece of junk) with a tarp on it. As soon as they came Ross was offered drugs, people want these guys removed for safety issues.

Then Ross got home and started getting stuff in Betsy so I took Lucky to the vet for a letter of health for her to cross the border with. Then Lily came to clean the house, Ross left to pay all of our bills. Sue came around 4:30 to get more back pills from us for Harold, his back is pretty sore; I’m going to pick some up for them in Edmonton to bring back. I went just before 5 to pick up Felix (our house sitter) to come to the house and stay the night as we are leaving first thing in the morning. I think we have a good guy looking after our house and critters!
We got up (you’re not going to believe this) at 7:30 this morning to head out, wow it was even light out!!! Poor Felix, Ross put an alarm clock on my bedside table last night and the alarm was set for 6am!

We went into the house (we stayed in Betsy), showered, checked emails and left. Hurray, ON THE ROAD AGAIN!!!

We left Bucerias at 9:10, did a quick stop at Oxxo for a couple of sandwiches (for breakfast) some coffee and I got some orange juice.

Things that we saw:
A HUGE chicken farm
The mountains were really smoky, kinda cool looking
There was quite a bit of construction on the roads (we thought maybe we were in Alberta)???
We saw some really cool cigar cactus that were blooming really pretty yellow flowers
Our tolls were: From Tepic to Mazatlan 597 pesos
From Mazatlan to Culiacan 325 pesos
From Culiacan to Guasave 181 pesos
The total for today is 1103
We could take the Libre (free road) but it is only 2 lanes and way too much very very slow traffic.

We had a bit of a hiccup about 100 km before Culiacan. I heard an awful noise, looked out the window but couldn’t see anything so we carried on. About 30 km before the town Betsy started making road noises and it was really bumpy, so we got out to look and guess what, you guessed it, a blown tire on the back, thankfully we have 2 on each back tires, so we drove really slowly to Culiacan hoping to find a place to get a new one. We couldn’t find one so we stopped outside a Burger King to see maybe someone spoke English and could point us in the right direction, alas no. I did however stop some people getting into their car in the parking lot and lo and behold the girl spoke English. We walked over to the Pharmacia to see if we could get some yellow pages to look for the nearest tire place. We didn’t find one there however there were about 7 or 8 people in the store and they were all trying to remember where it would be. They finally came to a conclusion and they very kindly drove a head of us so we could follow them to the store. I have to put a comment in here, the family that was so kind to lead us to the tire place was headed to visit family in the hospital! WE love Mexico! The first place was too little so we went to a second tire store that was great. We ended up using our spare tire, so we will have to buy another one soon. There were 3 guys working on Betsy (the spare had a special bolt on it so no one could steal it and we didn’t have the wrench to take it off) so they finally got it off, tried to take the wheel off, it was very hard to get it off, put the spare on, filled all the tires all for 80 pesos! $5 bucks! Amazing! I think the guys called a friend of theirs cause a guy came by that spoke very good English and we chatted with him while the tire was getting done. Once we were ready to leave he asked us if he could bless our journey, awwwwwwwwwwwwwww. We said a prayer, hugged and reluctantly left. Did I say how much I love the Mexican people?
We are now stopped at a wonderful truck stop, we had Subway for supper which was delicious. I told Ross our last night in Mexico and we eat at Subway, go figure.
Well I’m gonna go to bed now, a long drive to the border tomorrow
Ross Kim and Lucky south of Los Mochis in Betsy

Thursday July 8th, 2010

Hurray, not much happened today. We got up early (I know, dah) and was on the road at 7:20 . We did pass a truck going the other way that had flames shooting out of the bottom! Ross thinks maybe the brakes caught on fire.
Tolls were 282 to Obregon and 280 to the border, so we spent a total of 1665 pesos to get from PV to the good old’ USA!

We stopped at mile marker 21 to get the sticker removed from our RV so we can bring another car back and they won’t do it without the trailer! So we fly back home and buy a vehicle in Mexico!

It took us a good hour in line at the border and they did come in to see what we had, but there were no problems, of course. We also got stopped in Mexico with a bit of a search also, again no big deal.

I put in Cracker Barrel in my GPS and we followed the directions to Tucson and, to of course, my favorite restaurant! What a meal, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh .
We stopped at Walmart to pick up a few things then went to one RV resort, it was closed and it looked like a trailer park, lots of long term RV
parking, so we went back to Walmart and stayed there, it was much cheaper too!

Ross Kim and Baby girl in Tucson sleeping in Betsy

Friday July 8th, 2010

We got up early AGAIN, what is with this??? I found out I didn’t have any shampoo in my little bag of goodies so off to Walmart again for some shampoo and some coffee and egg mcmuffin at McD’s.

We are now sitting at an RV repair place so they can pop rivet the body panel by the tire that blew, they found our compressor (Ross couldn’t find it) and they are trying to get our horn to work. That is always a good thing to be working on a vehicle. We then are going to stop at Discount Tire for a new spare tire, before moving on.

Well Discount Tire didn’t have the right size tire so he called his Flagstaff store and they had one, so we picked it up once we got there. They couldn’t put it on the rim though so they told us to go to highway 40 east and there will be an Ace Truck Centre that would put it on for us. On this highway also is the Meteor Crater which Ross has always wanted to go to, so we decided not to journey to Williams until tomorrow and we will go see the crater.

On a side note we tried to add the tire place onto our GPS for directions and alas we got lost, but, we found a really neat part of Flagstaff that if I was to move I would move to that one area, soooooooooooo cute, almost like white ave! But we do have a very large tire in our motor home waiting for someone to put it on for us. We are thinking we will stop at a flying J maybe.

We are now sitting at a very nice RV park (with internet, the first we have had since we left) just a few miles from the crater, and we are going to go see it before we leave here. We have to drive back to Flagstaff to take Highway 40 west to Williams.

So I’ll say goodnight for now

Ross Kim and Baby girl in Meteor Crater Arizona in Betsy