It's a good thing Igor broke down!

Wow, lots to talk about today! And so, a long blog post with lots of photos. And lots of good news!

The mechanics didn't begin work on Igor until about 10:00am, which was okay with us. We left them to do the installation of the fuel pump and re-install the gas tank, and we decided to do a 10 km (6.2 mile) walk to a nearby lake.

We had to walk by the central plaza in Galeana, and we could hear music and a lot of activity. So we went over to see what was going on. 

The plaza was all decorated for a fiesta!

It turns out that yesterday was Día de la Revolución (Revolution Day in Mexico) and there was a big parade going on. We've been to quite a few small town parades is Mexico, and they're always well done. We made our way down to the starting point and didn't have to wait long for things to begin.

(Don't forget, you can click on any photo to make it full screen!)

Most of the area schools take part.

This was a military school.

The school basketball team.

These boys did a tumbling demonstration.

Ruth took a short video for you...

And a boxing demonstration.

Here's another video... turn up your volume...

Lots of girls in pretty dresses.

Some of the dresses covered the horse!

These kids did a little skit about the revolution.

Another video, of a military college...

Even the military got in on the fun!

They look pretty serious!

The parade lasted almost and hour and a half and we watched the whole thing. Lots of fun! It's a good thing Igor broke down, or we never would have seen it!

Then, we set off on our original plan to walk to the laguna.

It's a really beautiful area.

5 kms (3 miles) each way from the town.

We should have made the effort to go to Pozo del Gavalin. 

It's a sinkhole cenote in the middle of the desert.

Another time.

While we were walking to town, I received a short email from Amazon...

Hello. We have restored your access to this account. You can now sign in and place orders. Thank you for your patience and we are sorry if any inconvenience was caused. If you want to continue using Prime benefits, please re-subscribe.

If they were truly sorry, they would have sent a $100 gift card as well!

Anyhow, at least that's fixed.

Kevin, with the Laguna sign.

It's pretty quiet on a weekday.

The water level used to be much lower. That's the roof of a building!

The ducks were noisy. They must have thought they were going to be fed!

This caterpillar was on the bench where we sat down to take a break.

They have a few picnic shelters.

Did I mention it was a beautiful day? Clear blue sky, with a high of about 22C (72F).

By the time we made it back to town, the parade was only just making it's way to the finish line.

Then we walked back to the shop to see how Igor was doing, and we were surprised to see that he was totally put back together. The mechanic hadn't test drove him, but he was running well, and he was confident that replacing the pump had fixed the problem.

Total bill to remove the fuel, remove the fuel tank, weld the broken holding straps that had snapped when they tried to loosen the rusted nuts, drive to the city to pick up the parts, put together the new fuel pump, re-install the pump in the tank, re-install the tank, and put back the 3/4 of a tank of fuel they had removed...

total of 5,000 pesos ($342 CAD, $246 USD).

Not bad. It would have been well over $1,000 in Canada.

We went and had some lunch, and made another stop at the ATM for some cash and went back and paid the bill. Nice guy, and he said that whenever we're back in Galeana to make sure to stop in and say hello.

It was already after 2:30pm, so we hesitated about driving all the way to Matehuala because we wouldn't get there until after 5:00pm. It gets dark at 6:00pm. But, it's a busy main highway trucking route, and there are lots of spots to pull over if we had to spend the night. So we decided to carry on.

They are doing some major construction on the road between Galeana and the main highway.

Building a new bridge.

We made it to the main highway and Igor was running perfectly. In fact, probably the best that he has been. I think maybe the fuel pump was weak, and he wasn't running at full power the entire time. I dunno. Anyhow, I'm confident the problem has been solved!

Scenery along the way.

We crossed from the state of Nuevo Leon to the state of San Luis Potosi.

As we entered Matehuala, we noticed that the circus is in town!

There is a big Walmart store here, so we decided to do some stocking up before heading to the RV Park. With that done, we drove over to the Las Palmas Inn. This is the place where our last caravan group spent nine nights at the beginning of Covid at the end of March 2020.

So, it's been more than four and a half years since then! Wow!

I went in to reception to pay for our planned two night stay. It's normally quite an expensive place, but the girl said that there is an RV caravan coming in for the second night, and they don't have room. I mentioned that we don't need any services... just somewhere to park, so she only charged me for one night at full price, with the second night apparently free and she marked on the invoice "second night without services".

So, we paid 380.8 pesos ($26 CAD, $19 USD) total for the two nights.

There were three other rigs already here.

A big rig from Quebec, a single guy from Minnesota, and the furthest rig.

We spent a lot of time drinking margaritas around this pool last time we were here with the group!

Today, we are just going to hang out and putter around here, and maybe go in for a walk around town. I still need to find a computer repair place to transfer some files from my old laptop to the new one.

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