Playa Ventura

Thursday March 5…10:30pm

Sure enough, we were up at 6:30am, and we hit the road at 7:00am.

We think that Puerto Escondido has become our favorite place in Mexico so far, and I’m sure part of that is because of the people we were fortunate enough to meet. But the area itself is great as well with a lot of nice beaches. This will certainly be one the the places we will return to in the future.

We drove about 60 km’s (an hours drive) to Rio Grande and stopped for breakfast. There was a free internet signal coming from somewhere so I went online for a bit, and we ended up sitting there for an hour.

Heading on towards Acapulco, we stopped at a tire repair place and I got them to switch around one of our tires. It has been wearing on one side and we will have to get some suspension work done when we’re back in the US, but it should be fine now until then. To remove the wheel, switch around the tire, and balance it was 100 pesos ($8.80 CAN, $6.60 US).

The drive today took us inland away from the coast for most of the time. There is a lot of farming here and a lot of land with lemon and lime tree orchards.

Heading into another little town, we heard a clanging sound and immediately pulled over. We had been coming up to a tope (speed bump) so we were going pretty slow anyhow. I got out to see what the problem was, and found that the muffler for our generator had half fallen off. It was easy to totally remove the muffler, and I’ll reinstall it when we get parked up somewhere. We don’t use the generator anyhow, so it’s not a big deal. This happened around lunchtime, so we grabbed a bite to eat while we were stopped.

Just after the town of Marquelia, we turned left to go to Playa Ventura. The signs all say “Playa Ventura”, but the official name of the town is Juan Alvarez. We had read that you could park at one of the many small restaurants lining the beach, and in fact our friends Bonnie and Bill, as well as Steve and Glen also came down and stayed here when they drove up the coast. Fortunately S&G sent us their experience and we ended up staying at the same place. For 60 pesos ($5.25 CAN, $4.00 US) per night, we are parked in a little parking area with bathrooms and showers, and even a nice little swimming pool. They have hammocks under shade palapas and we are right on the beach. We are the only ones here. We’ll stay here for the day tomorrow, and then do the 145 km (90 mile) drive to Acapulco on Saturday morning.

Playa Ventura

Ruth and Whiskey at Playa Ventura

This is what I will be doing most of the day tomorrow...

Today we drove about 270 kms (165 miles) and it took us about 5.5 hours of driving. There were sections of the road where we actually got up to 80 km/h (50 mph) and even had the cruise control on for a few minutes, but for the most part it’s pretty slow going with lots of villages and speed bumps.

Watched a movie this evening. “Adaptation”, with Merryl Streep and Nicolas Cage. It was a bit odd, but Cage is a good actor.

Total nights sleeping in a motorhome…496

March Fuel $ 44.00 CAN

March Grocery $ 34.82 CAN

March Overnight costs $ 5.25 CAN