Near Puerto Ceiba

Tuesday December 9…10:45pm

Well today was another interesting day!

We were ready to go by 8am, just as we had mentioned to the rancher. We drove out of his cow pasture and one of his daughters opened the gates for us leading towards the path to the road.

It was pretty much just a two lane path leading to the road, winding it’s way among some palm trees. The sun was shining right in our faces when Ruth warned me to watch out for a tree stump off to her side. I didn’t see it because of the sun, but I didn’t stop either. I just kept going, even though we were just crawling along anyhow. We heard the “crunch” and I got out to inspect. Our electric entrance steps, which were properly folded up, had just caught the corner of the tree stump. But it was enough, they were badly bent.

Kevin laughing at our mangled steps!

Steve and Glen had already pulled off to the side of the road ahead of us, and came back to inspect the damage. Soon enough, three of the local women were also standing there staring at it with us. I decided the best idea was to totally remove the steps and try and salvage them at a later date. I’m actually surprised at how bent they are, because we were moving slowly and they are made of strong steel. Oh well. It only took half an hour or so to remove the steps and then we were on our way again.

Kevin's audience watching him remove the steps

Steve and Kevin working on removing the steps

We headed back to the Mex 180 highway and took that until the turnoff to highway 187 and the city of Paraiso. We stopped at a Soriana grocery store in Comalcalco. A Soriana store is a Mexican version of Walmart, and has just about everything we need.

We were looking for a beach area a little east of Paraiso, but took a few different routes before giving up and heading west again towards Ciudad Del Carmen. As we were making our way through Paraiso, S&G were ahead of us and they came to a confusing set of traffic lights. They continued through, and we followed behind. It appeared to us as we went through the lights, that the lights weren’t working at all. In fact, both Ruth and I agreed that none of the lights were on at all. Anyhow, we heard the honking of a motorcycle policeman and we both pulled over. We were about to carry on, hoping that only one of us would have a problem, so we pulled past S&G, but the cop made a point of waving us over too. We found out later that S&G had motioned that they couldn’t speak Spanish at all, and had handed the cop a Spanish-English phrase book in the hopes that he would become frustrated and just send them on their way. But a local who spoke a bit of English interrupted their fun, and arranged for S&G to pay the cop 100 pesos ($9.50 CAN, $7.60 US) to let us all on our way.

We are parked right on the beach a few miles east of Puerto Ceiba. It’s not the nicest parking area…an abandoned restaurant lot, but it’s interesting watching the boats go by and we can see two huge oil rig platforms on the horizon. While we were sitting on the beach near dusk, a helicopter flew by so close that I waved to the pilot and we all saw him wave back. He immediately turned and did a fly by right over us. It was kind of neat.

It was hot today. High about 30C (86F) and as I write this at almost 11pm the temperature in the motorhome with all the windows open is 26C (80F).

Total nights sleeping in a motorhome…412

December Fuel $180.50 CAN

December Grocery $ 100.05 CAN

December Overnight costs $ 49.80 CAN