We left Oaxaca and began our return to the USA. It is about 960 miles to the border in Texas and then another 900 miles back to Arizona to meet up with family. We chose this route in order to minimize the time of travel in Mexico, which had much higher fuel costs and much slower average speeds. The tolls alone are quite expensive. Today we only fueled up once, but it was a big one since the fuel stations on this portion of the Autopista were very far apart. I am making better mileage on this stretch of road, but 14 mpg is still low when gas is $6+ per gallon. One fuel up was $125 USD and we spent a total of $1000 pesos ($56 USD) for toll roads. Mexico is gracious to charge huge prices for fuel and then the additional privilege of bouncing along C-rated roads for a premium charge. To be honest, there were some good sections of road, but the 1-2 km stretches of good are quickly forgotton with the rest of the road. We left just after 9am and drove until after dark at about 7:30pm, with only one 90 minute detour due to a fog-induced wreck that closed the road (no refund for the toll, BTW). We averaged 37 mpg for the day on a 382 mile day.
We connected with a friend of ours from Canada, who said he was at this particular town. It was almost on our route and we thought we could stop by and hang out for the evening. Unfortunately, the town he was speaking of was 9 hours to the south of us, and the one we were looking at was an hour or so from where we were… Oh well. Ian we will catch you on your way up in AZ. Looking forward to hanging with you then.
The landscape was really interesting in this part of Mexico. We climbed into the central Mexico Mountains to the east of Puebla and after crossing the pass, we noted the forest became tropical and incredibly green. The whole area on the way down the pass was foggy and we could only see 3-4 cars in front of us, but it was definitely a nice change to the leaf-barron branches of the forests we have been in for quite some time. We ended up at a Pemex station for the night where we camped on a gravel patch with the approval of the night guard.
Oh, the “fix” I did on the back of the camper is improving the feel of the camper. I did hit one Topa on the route that killed one of the eye-bolts, but the nice thing is it feels more stable. I have some more ideas and will take care of them when I get ot AZ.
Just a funny picture of Maggie as she was sleeping this evening. These pups keep us laughing every day.
Not many pictures today. We will get those when we return back here after the family visit we decided to do. Here is a map of our travels for today.
