Catemaco

We took off around 8:00, planning to head to Villahermosa, with 544 miles on the truck since we entered Mexico. The roads had beautiful scenery, but the condition of the roads was pretty consistently bad. Our 50mph from Thursday was down to about 35mph, and it was still bumpy. This was even on the toll roads, which were pretty expensive – we went about 270 miles, and it cost $41US. However, the route from the campground into Veracruz was breathtaking, with high, steep mountains on our right, and cliffs down to the gulf on our left. We made it into Veracruz, which is a beautiful city, and where we got a beep and a thumps up from a guy driving an RV from Oregon, but I managed to get us totally driving in circles because I’d read the directions, tell Tom which way to go, then change my mind and have him turn around, then figure out that I was right the first time so he’d have to turn around again. For some reason he didn’t kill me, and drove really well especially considering that the traffic in the city was very heavy, and while U-turns are allowed, the streets are narrow and it’s tough to get the truck and trailer around in one swing. We also had our first encounter with a policeman, who waved us over. We’re not sure what he wanted, although we suspect that we weren’t supposed to be driving a truck pulling a trailer in the city, but in any case when he realized we didn’t speak Spanish, he apparently decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and sent us on our way.

We finally escaped from Veracruz and got on a toll road that runs all the way from Veracruz to Villahermosa. This is when we realized that just because you’re paying to travel a road, it doesn’t mean the road is good. We stopped at a “rest area,” which is a gravel patch on the side of the road, and went in the trailer to get lunch. The trailer was a disaster. I had stupidly stored glass containers in the cabinet in the trailer, thinking that if I wedged everything in pretty tightly and didn’t put glass next to glass, everything would be fine. Wrong. The cabinet had popped open, and we had balsamic vinegar, maple syrup (not my big stash, just a small glass gift jar), honey, and Tabasco sauce all over the stove, counters, floor, the boxes we put on the floor so they wouldn’t fall off the shelf, the walls, and various other things. We decided there was nothing to do about it there, so we got our lunch and got back in the truck to replan our drive for the remainder of the day.

Since going was so much slower than we had planned, and we knew we now had a big cleanup job ahead of us, we looked at the map and found a small town named Catemaco that the owner of the El Corsario campground had recommended. We ditched the directions we had been using and got off the tollroad on a road that looked like a quick drive to Catemaco through two other small towns. Wrong again. The road on the map was a twisty, turny, narrow, potholed road through the mountains. At one pointed we stopped at a Pemex (Petroleum Mexico) to make sure we were on the right road, and while the people at the Pemex were very helpful, a drunk followed Tom back to the truck and wanted 50 pesos ($5 US) for “helping” him. Another man getting gas smiled at us, Tom gave the drunk only 10 pesos, then the other patron ran the guy off, and we were on our way again.


Peace! If nothing else is accomplished on this trip, Lou and Mel are getting along better. Maybe it's because Lou has heard us tell so many people that Mel is 10 and won't last much longer.






When we got to Catemaco, it was well worth the drive. The trailer park we were heading for turned out to be the parking lot of a restaurant, La Ceiba, and it was right on the most gorgeous lake, with wide sidewalks winding right along the lake shore, and restaurants and hotels on the other side of the street. We parked and decided the mess could wait, and took the dogs for a long walk along the lake shore. Mel was feeling much better after two days of rest, and that was a good thing because everybody wanted to know if he was a biter, what kind of dog he was, how hold he was, whether or not he was neutered, and could they take his picture with their cell phone, so he had to withstand a lot of attention. We also ran into lots of men who wanted to take us on boat tours of the lake, which probably would have been beautiful, but we decided that since we had no idea what they’d be showing us, it probably wasn’t worth the time.




We got back to the camper and did the cleanup, which turned out to be not that bad, and which I probably should have done anyway. Everything was wiped down, and the remaining glass jars were bubble wrapped and put in a box. The camper now smells a little like balsamic vinegar, but on the grand scale of things, that’s not a bad smell. We found that we’re getting better at understanding people, and had a long talk with the lot’s night watchman, who thought Mel was a caballito (a pony – have we heard this before?). Someone had asked me the day before if we fed the dogs horsemeat, and I had tried, unsuccessfully, I think, to tell them I was a horsewoman. So, since this man had brought up the subject of horses, we asked him what I was, and he said a horsewoman in Mexico is a dama montadora. Tom looked it up in our Spanish/English dictionary, and it loosely translates to “lady in a saddle.” I guess that will do for now.

We slept with the background noise of teenage boys with boomboxes in loud cars cruising the street and whistling to the girls on the sidewalk, but after a long day in the car – about 275 miles over 9 ½ hours – we didn’t have any trouble sleeping.