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| The final leg of our journey south. Through Tepic - Compostela - Las Varas to LDM |
Halloween day was the last day of our journey to Lo de Marcos. We got the earliest start yet, hitting the road at 7 a.m. It was partially because we had a horrible night as the station was extremely busy with trucks coming in at all hours, riding their super loud air brakes as they slowed to turn into the station. Then, the beep beep beep as they backed into a spot. And of course poor HoseHey howling all night as he too didn’t like the noise and the unfamiliar location. Never again would we stay there. I think I said that already in the last blog post didn’t I?
Upon leaving the station we had to head in the wrong direction and do a u-turn to get us back on track headed south toward Tepic. That was a fun start to the morning with barely enough room to manoeuvre our 63 foot long length. We did get ourselves turned around without much incident, so what if we had to block traffic going south for a bit while we manoeuvred 😝. And thankfully we didn’t run into any ‘men in black’ who had been reported along this stretch of road between Escunapa and Tepic. They are apparently official Mexican government workers looking for people smuggling cartel money back into Mexico and they are known to search your vehicle, go through your personal belongings and even pat people down. To be honest, if we saw them we likely would have played dumb and just kept driving. For the most part it seems they pull over people in single vehicles more so than those in RV’s anyway.
This route was new for us as last year we turned toward the coast just before Tepic and headed toward Aticama. We had thought that was a mistake as the road along the coast was narrow and very curvy with many overhanging trees. We were soon to find out that it wasn’t such a bad route after all.
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| The route we took down last year |
I didn’t take any pictures during this part of the trip as I had to pay attention as the navigator - to make sure I didn’t send us down any cramped narrow streets! Once in Tepic it was a bit confusing as I tried to follow the Nogales to PV road guide we had printed off last year. The landmark and signs were a bit different but we made it into the city and on the right path without too much difficulty. The real stress started as we left Tepic and travelled toward Compostela on a very narrow stretch of road with no shoulder. That didn’t improve as we got through Compostela and started to climb the extremely narrow curvy roads. We were behind a fully loaded gravel truck which was just fine by us as we were in no rush and intended to take our time. Some of the stress admitedly came from watching him drive in front of us with his tires riding the shoulder and looking as though they were going to go off it at any time! We had quite a line up of traffic behind us too as we were taking it carefully and they were not always so patient, often riding our bumper and even trying to pass in very tight situations. I swear some people have a death wish! Expecially Mexican drivers. As much as they are a very calm people, when they get behind the wheel look out their foot is on the gas pedal and they’re moving! Perhaps some of the scariest driving though is the oncoming traffic that seems to whiz around the narrow bends appearing to almost be right in your lane. It was a bit of a nail biter, so much so that we vowed we’d never drive that route again. We even talked about only going as far as Mazatlan next year, so we could avoid this stretch all together.
Thankfully we made it without any incidents and just shortly past noon on Halloween day we pulled into our site at La Parota RV Park. It was amazing how quickly the stress of the drive that morning, heck the stress of the entire drive, quickly faded away!! We were met at the gate by the owners Juan Jose and his lovely wife Maria who greeted us literally with open arms, huge smiles and a “welcome home”.
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| Our view from our site looking out the bathroom window |
As we were still rather early in the season the park was pretty much empty. Most people don’t come down until mid to late November. We weren’t sure what to expect as last year we didn’t arrive until mid December. We later learned most don’t arrive until later because of the heat and humidity that is still rather intense into mid November. The day we arrived HeyZeus was feeling that heat too! Before the AC kicked in we found him lying in the cool bathroom sink. That was a first. Damn he is a cutie! 🥰
After a much needed nap, we started setting up our site. We were all happy to be “home” for the winter especially HoseHey who clearly had enough of the whole driving and stopping in different locations part of the journey.
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