5/14/2014: Driving across Mexico

Saturday morning, May 3rd. We were up and moving by 4:30 am; the car was as full as we could make it, and still leave room for Jack. One final look at the boat, and we were on the road by 8:30.

I closed that hatch.

We got on the road by 8:30. Karin had printed out directions from google maps (about 5 pages), with that and a road atlas of Mexico, (in English!) we were confident that we would find our way home.

The first challenge was getting out of Tapachula....for some reason every major highway in and out of town is Mexico 200. We drove past one intersection, but felt like there was another one a little farther ahead. To make a long story short, we drove all the way around Tapachula, only to end up on the 200 we saw at first. 

9:30, we're on the highway, paying tolls, and making good time.

Travelling at 120 kph,.. in a few hours we had driven past the Gulf of Tehuantepec. Wow! That was easy. It was very windy, the perfect location for a wind farm.

Eventually, we were getting close to the Gulf of Mexico, near Veracruz, when we turned north toward Puebla and Mexico City. It was getting late and we needed to find a place for the night. At a large Pemex truck stop, there was a hotel,  and 24 hour restaurant. Perfect, but would they take dogs (Mascota)?

At first the answer was no, then .... o.k. While we gathered our things, another man showed up and wanted to see a room, we found out later, he was upset because he had seen a dog on the premises.

As we settled into the room, the phone rang. Who could that be? The guy at the front desk needs to see me now. He explained about the other customer, and said we couldn't have the dog, o.k. now what are we supposed to do? We agreed to hide him, he couldn't come out,.. no one can see, or hear him.

O.k., thank you!

Sunday morning we were up at 5 and on the road. Jack has resigned himself to being trapped in the car, he sleeps. By mid afternoon we were approaching Puebla, the "Arco de Norte" or beltway around Mexico City. I had not thought about the scenery much, being focused on directions, and other traffic. Winding our way up to about 7500', it looked like European alpine pastures, it was beautiful.

When we got on the Arco de Norte, it was great! Nice road, no traffic, just cruising through the countryside... oops, all of a sudden it turned into a two lane road!? What happened? Are we lost? We did a u turn and ended up on an off ramp going to Mexico City. We told the attendant, and Federales that we  were going the wrong way,... they told us to turn around and go back up the ramp!! O.k., we drove past another Federale who had witnessed our u turn, he honked, we waved and kept going! Unreal. A few miles later an accident happened up ahead, and everything stopped. While we waited, we watched half a dozen people on horseback, with their dogs, herding sheep and cattle on a Sunday afternoon. 

A small truck had hit the guardrail, and gone off the road. Hopefully he wasn't seriously hurt. A few minutes later, traffic was moving, and we were on our way. 

We made it to the west side of Guadalajara just before dark, and found the ZAR Hotel. It was nice, with A/C, and dogs are no problem. We had some Pollo Feliz for dinner and made it an early night.

Monday; Cinco de Mayo. Surprisingly, the traffic was fairly heavy until we had driven for an hour or so. Things were going well, the tolls were getting frequent an expensive. Just when we thought we were done we got off of Arco de Norte; 388 Pesos! We had to count every bill and coin we could find and still came up a few pesos short. Karin gave her 2 quarters, and she let us go. A few miles later, another toll booth appeared on the horizon. Guess what? No mas dinero. We tried to find an ATM with no luck. We had kept a $100.00 bill for a backup, but they wouldn't take it, again we had to turn around at a toll booth. We drove to the next town and found a bank, now with plenty of Pesos, we're headed for San Carlos.

The rest of the drive, and our adjustment to being back in the U.S. will be in the next post

A note from Karin:  Mexico was absolutely BEAUTIFUL.  I had a long time to think about it and came to the conclusion that the lack of billboards, and fast food chains were what made it a little different from the U.S.

5/7/2014; Back home.

 3000 miles of sailing, 2000 miles of driving, some great people, some great stories, and we're home!

Following 5 months of living aboard, the boat was in pretty rough shape, once everything was stowed away we were able to really clean her up.

Now she's tied up in Marina Chiapas for the summer, the staff regularly checks the boats, so we feel good about leaving her there.

We're still adjusting to being back. I'll post soon about the drive, and Chiapas. We made it through our second sailing season, and the drive across Mexico, with no real problems, having fun all the way!

 Yeah!

5/1/2014: Preparing to leave the boat

This week has been cleaning, organizing, and planning the road trip back to Arizona. It has been pretty hot and humid, with mosquito's at night; we are loving our air conditioner!

We've removed both sails, and the solar panels, I also made sure to run fresh water through the outboard, and run all of the fuel out of it.

I still have to take care of the generator. We "pickled" our water maker, though not without some difficulty. The fuse for our boost pump blew, and it didn't seem to work right. Eventually we found our mistake; the brine discharge line was closed, and we were just pressurizing the system. A few calls to Cruise R/O and we got it working. Rich was great for answering our calls after hours. Great company!

We had a get together with some of the cruisers at the Baos restaurant here in the marina, as well as our friend Arturo from Macaw tours..

Later last night we had our first heavy downpour. We had a couple of hatches open, but luckily nothing got too wet, before we closed them. Unfortunately, there were a lot of clothes, tools, and books in the cockpit, hopefully, we'll get everything dried out before we leave on Saturday. 

We'll pick up the rental car tomorrow afternoon, and do some last minute running around, then head for Puebla first thing in the morning. It's going to take us a few days to get home. We'll stop in Mazatlan to see John and Lisa from Molly J and Dave from Rogue, then on to Hermosillo, Nogales, and Scottsdale eventually.

Getting Jack home

Karin wrote:

We Love Jack, and he is an awesome little guy, but it has been a real pain trying to figure out how to get home with him.  We can't fly him into Phoenix because it is too hot.  So we looked into renting a car. Last week we were told it would cost $2500 to drive a car from Tapachula to Nogales.  He can't ride on the bus, so we thought about one of us flying home and getting the Toyota and driving back to the boat (which is on the Mexico Guatamala border) and THEN driving all of us back home......crap!  So we looked at options of just staying here in the Tapachula area for the summer, and Joe and I taking turns flying home.  We really love it here and would love to rent a little place in the mountains, but we need to do some work on the house in Scottsdale to get it ready to put up for sale, see my Mom, and replenish the sailing kitty.

 Leave it to a dog to mess with the kitty!

Today Joe tried an online rental car booking site and got a quote of just over $1000. usd ( $900. of it is a drop off fee). We have to drop the car in Hermosillo, Sonora about 4 hours from Tucson. That works for us, plenty of friends could pick us up from there!
Now we have a departure date of May 6th so preparations for leaving the boat are underway.  We hope to come back July or August and continue exploring this area and hopefully rent that little cabin in the Mountains!

p.s.

I do need to give a special thanks to Mark for being a great crew member! He was willing to help out with anything, and was always up for having fun!

4/24/2014; Marina Chiapas and beyond

 Once we had settled in to the marina, it was time to explore the area. The local taxis are very reasonable; 14 pesos each to get to Puerto Madero., and 20 pesos on the "collectivo" to get to Tapachula. Puerto Madero is a small town, notable for its rickshaw style taxis, (peddle and powered). We walked up to the beach, and saw a small seafood restaurant,; time for lunch! When we walked in, we were surprised to see a pool for the children to play in, right in the middle of the restaurant.

After enjoying a great ceviche, and fish fillet, we were entertained by watching the iguanas sunning themselves on the rocks.

A few minutes later, an old woman selling mango's came up to our table, Karin bought a few, but the woman insisted  that she get a few more.  We were obliged to help her out; we've seen so many people, selling anything, trying to get by. They carry heavy loads, all day, in the sun.. to maybe sell  some fruit, or shoes, or jewelry,  or carvings. I have to admire their stamina, and patience.

Next, we decided to rent a car and see some of the surrounding area. The fact that Easter weekend was approaching was evident by the crowds in the marina restaurant, and on the road to the beach. Ruta de Cafe sounded interesting, a drive up into the mountains = cool air!! It has been hot and humid, thankfully our A/C is working great, but it's time to get off the boat for a while.

As we wound our way up into the mountains, the road got smaller, and eventually deteriorated to a steep rocky  trail. The little Hundai made it. At one point the road was so bad, we seriously considered giving up and turning around but Mark said "Carry On!" Glad we took his advice. When we arrived at Finca Hamburgo, we were amazed to find a beautiful restaurant, and 70 degree temperatures, overlooking cloud forests and coffee fields.

Bertha, the hostess/manager was so nice. There are three cabanas, which were full, and we were thinking about staying the night, because none of us were looking forward to the bone jarring ride back down the mountain. Berta being a good business woman, said we could rent one of the apartments in the coffee mill for $80.00. Two bedrooms, one bath and a kitchen. Karin and Mark went to check it out, while I stayed with Jack. They came back smiling! We'll take it. What a relief... we can relax, hike around, and come back for dinner.

A short walk up the hill, led us into the workers village. There seemed to be a celebration going on. In this part of Mexico, the Easter festivities are not as Catholic as you would think. We were  confused about the costumes, men dressed as women,  devils, and ghouls. Supposedly, it's more about Judas, than Jesus, I don't know, but everybody was having fun.

We still had the car for another day, so after we left Hamburgo, we got back to the boat, and planned to go to the volcano the next morning. Another drive through some small towns, but this road got steeper  and steeper, until the little Hundai could go no farther. We stopped in Union Juarez to see more of the Judas celebration, then made our way down the mountain to for some lunch.

Now, it's time to get back to sorting out stuff on the boat, and making a plan for the haul out.

As usual, we've found ourselves with too many options......should we stay here for the summer?, should we go home?, should we bring the car down? I think things will work themselves out, it's just very hard to make plans.... things change, new situations come up....we'll figure something out!

4/19/2014: Crossing the Tehuantepec

Going back to the crossing... our friend Mark arrived on Friday morning, the weather window was open; so we agreed on a midnight departue. After stowing the dinghy and securing the deck, we headed into the night.
There was no wind to speak of, so we motored through the darkness, using our AIS and radar.
The next day, Mark took the helm all day, allowing us some needed rest. We enjoyed sailing at 4- 5 knots on our course!

I put out a line, and soon hooked a Bonita. We let him go, and caught another one 5 minutes later. We brought in the line... tired of injuring fish lips for no good reason. That evening the wind backed off, so we motor sailed through the night on 3 to 4 hour watches.

Shortly after sunrise, I was on watch, and noticed a difference in the water about a mile or two ahead.

Very quickly, the wind came up to about 30 or 35 knots ( a guess), with line of building chop as far as I could see! All I could think of was that an unexpected Tehauntepecker was brewing; we were about 8 miles offshore, so I turned into the wind, and our speed dropped to about 2 knots. I woke Karin up, and  was seriously concerned about our situation. Fortunately, I think it was a local condition of cool night air descending from the mountains, and it quickly abated. Whew! That was exciting!

The rest of the crossing was uneventful, except on night watch, we passed an unlit panga, miles offshore, and by the time I saw him, had we been a quarter mile north, we would have hit him. Oh well, we didn't!

We were making good time, and had to slow down to arrive in daylight, so we heaved to for a couple hours and had lunch. Shortly after sunrise, we were on our approach into Chiapas.

We docked in the marina. and were soon boarded by the Navy, and Harbormaster;  they were very friendly, courteous, and enjoyed telling us about the Miss Pacifico bikini contest, including wet t-shirts! We all had a good laugh. Once we had cleared  the paperwork, we headed to the palapa bar for breakfast and our landing cocktail!

That's it! This sailing season is done.... we'll spend the week exploring Tapachula and Puerto Madero until Mark leaves on Monday, then we'll figure out our plan for the summer. We've got more photo's and stories from this week.. so ... we'll update soon.