Wandering around San Miguel de Allende

As expected, we had a peaceful nights sleep up at the botanical garden. After breakfast, we got ourselves packed up for the drive to the other side of town to the Hotel San Ramon that has an RV parking area.

There are only two RV park options in San Miguel de Allende. One is right in town located at the tennis courts. It's convenient for walking everywhere, but it's also fairly expensive. And the other is the Hotel San Ramon about 4 kms from the center of town.

Arrived in San Miguel de Allende

It was about a two and a half hour drive from Lagos de Moreno to San Miguel de Allende.

But it's not a very scenic drive until you get to the outskirts of Guanajuato. There's a lot of industrial areas, and of course we had to make our way around the big city of Leon, and the smaller city of Silao.

What a disappointment.

Sorry this is late! We wanted to get a decently early start, and I had some computer work to do first thing, so we just decided to put off the blog post. Anyhow, here it is!

On Thursday, we drove from the overnight spot at the dam up to the small city of Lagos de Moreno. 

Knock, knock, knock... by the police this time

It was another beautiful quiet night in the Primavera Forest just west of Guadalajara. But we had to put some miles on, because we want to be in San Miguel de Allende by Friday... Saturday morning at the very latest.

So we got things packed up and hit the road around 10:15am for the drive around the western part of the big city of Guadalajara.

Soak in a hot water river!

This is such a quiet spot during the week, but I'm sure it gets quite busy on the weekends because it is so close to the big city of Guadalajara. In fact, we are only 25 kms (15 miles) from the center of the city.

Yesterday, we walked to the hot springs river. In fact, the river is named Rio Caliente (Hot River). And it was hot, temperatures vary between 35 to 40 C (95 to 104 F)!

Moving on to the Primavera Biosphere Reserve

We tried to get going by 9:00am yesterday morning, but it was almost 10:00am by the time we said goodbye to Bonnie and her daughter Sam. We always love visiting this area at Etzatlan.

Then, we had to go into town and fill Igor's fuel tank. And pop in for some groceries. Then finally hit the road!

Now *that* was a parade!

When we had gone downtown on Thursday evening, we had been promised a "parade" that turned out to be a little lame. But yesterday there was talk of another parade... and this turned out to be the real thing.

It was supposed to start at 10:00am. But we know how things work in Mexico. So we set out from the campground at around 10:20am and walked downtown.

Carnaval in Etzatlan

So it's Carnaval weekend here in Etzatlan and there is a lot going on in town. 

We had wanted to see a fancy horse show at the bull ring on Friday afternoon, but unfortunately it got cancelled. Still, there's a lot of other stuff going on, and most of it is free.

More flight tickets bought!

I love buying flight tickets! Planning the trip is half the fun!

As you already know, we are booked to fly from Mexico City to Madrid, Spain on the evening of May 5th. But we only wanted to stay in Spain for a month or so while waiting for Scotland to warm up a little bit!

February Expenses... pretty good, except...

We actually had a pretty good month when it comes to our expense report. The only thing that put us over was Ruth's new laptop. 

Otherwise, we actually would have been slightly under budget.

There's always some kind of fiesta going on!

It's been over a month since we got Igor's fiberglas roof cap painted and during that time I just haven't had the opportunity to give him a proper bath with actual soap and running water. 

He was looking a little dusty too, so yesterday morning I got up the ambition to get him cleaned up!

It was a clear blue sky day!

We tried to get out fairly early yesterday for a hike. It gets pretty hot by afternoon, and certainly the morning is better for a hike. The high temperatures here have actually been pretty warm, at around 30C (86F), but there is absolutely zero humidity.

I think it was about 9:20am by the time we finally got going.

Flight tickets bought!

Ruth went over to the bathroom here at the campground, and came back to tell me I have to take a picture of the lizard she saw because it's so tiny!

So I wandered over later and put a coin on the floor beside it so you could see just how tiny it is.

Just relaxing...

And puttering around with Igor.

When we bought Igor at the end of June last year, he was a mess. One of the things that we never got done was to shampoo the carpet in the front. I mean, these vans don't have much of a carpet up there to begin with, so it shouldn't have been a very big job.

Into the town of Etzatlan

Sunday morning we walked into town. We just have to cross the main highway, then it's about a 20 minute walk on a cycling/walking path to get to town.

We just wandered around, then found a spot to have lunch.