It wouldn't be like us to take the easy route.

A long driving day for us yesterday.

Made even longer, by a decision I chose to make towards the end of the drive! Of course there was some logic to that decision, it simply didn't work out quite as well as we would have liked. Oh well. It wouldn't be like us to take the easy route, would it?

Still...I told Ruth when we got married that she would never be bored!

We were a few minutes late getting going, and it was about 8:30am when we hit the road. First order of business was to get around the city of Culiacan (pop 675,000).

A big part of this trip north is making the choice of free road versus toll road. In this situation, the free road actually goes right through the middle of the city. We decided that wasn't a good idea during morning rush hour, and perhaps not a good idea at any time.

So we chose to take the toll road, but once you get on the toll road, there is no easy way to get off it and back on the free road north of Culiacan.

Nice underpass mural.

Fancy hotel on the outskirts of Culiacan.

At the first toll booth. Have a seat!

It was at that very first toll booth that we saw how much truck traffic there was. Of course there was the occasional transport trailer on the free road, but nothing like this.

Just a busy, boring highway, with lots of agriculture as scenery.

Corn.

Tomatoes.

This was the typical scenery for most of the drive.

And, we had to pay for it. We were stopped at four toll booths along the way, for a total of 329 pesos ($25.60 CAD). Sherman had his cruise control on at 90 km/h (54 mph) pretty much the whole time. 

The road itself had it's good and bad parts...

Sometimes good.

Sometimes bad. 

Often busy.

But sometimes not.

But mostly, not in very good shape. 

We've never done this drive between Mazatlan and Hermosillo, and we may never do it again. It's simply not a nice drive in our opinion. But, we wanted to see the town of Alamos, and this is the only way to get there.

Coming from the north, you would take the turn off at Navajoa, and head east.

But coming from the south, I saw another road marked as highway 188 that seemed the more logical route. But I couldn't find any references online from anybody else who had gone that way. And normally, I check Google Streetview to check out the road ahead of time, but this particular route wasn't listed.

Heading north, we would save 23 kms (15 miles) by taking the 188 instead of the 13.

Once we made the decision to turn, it looked like it was a decent road...

Not bad, for a secondary road.

Not much traffic.

Decent scenery. Now this is more our style!

And things were going along just fine. The GPS showed that it was only another 15 kms (9 miles) or so  to get to the town of Alamos, when up ahead we saw that the paved road became a dirt road. 

Uh oh.

Well, at that point, there was no turning back. So, we simply drove on. The road was very rough. We were just crawling.

Pretty sure we're the first motorhome to do this!

Yes, a pickup truck would be a better vehicle for this road.

Yikes.

The dirt road lasted for about 8 kms (5 miles), and it took us about an hour to do it. Bouncing around like crazy. Caution opening cabinets...contents may have shifted!

It was not a fun hour.

And then, because we arrived at town through the back way, we had to make our way through the town center. It is not what you would call motorhome friendly!

But fortunately, not much traffic.

It was 4:30pm when we made our way to the Rancho Acosta Hotel and RV Park, and we were happy to see that blog readers Sheri and Mark were here as well. We've bumped into them a couple of times over the years and they are also avid Mexico travelers in their VW van. We'll show you a little more about this park tomorrow.

So we spent happy hour with them! 

Looking forward to our driving day off today as we will explore the area. Our feet have totally recovered from our long beach walk the other day, so we're ready for some hiking around town!

Yesterday's drive, 428 kms (265 miles).

Where we are now, at the town of Alamos.

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