Almost home!

At around 10am, we said goodbye to the friendly police officers who watched Igor for us while we were visiting the mine. 

Our route yesterday took us from Arcelia up into the mountains south of Valle de Bravo. It's a little busier route, especially when we got back on highway 134 that runs up to Toluca.

Luca Mining Campo Morado site visit

Anybody who follows the stock market knows that the world is a few years into a metals commodities bull market. And if history is any indication, it will continue for another four years or so.

Gold, silver, copper, and zinc are all hitting record high prices. There will be corrections along the way, but the best is yet to come.

Parked in front of the police station

Long driving day, but it was amazing. 

Almost zero traffic, and the scenery was spectacular. And I really mean almost zero traffic. I think we drove about 100 kms (62 miles) and saw perhaps 10 vehicles traveling the opposite way, and only one vehicle that passed us traveling in our direction.

Wandering around Zihuatanejo

We got Igor packed up and drove him over to the main Ixtapa hotel zone just after 9:00am to meet our long time friends Dave and Maggie. They live in Toronto and have rented a two bedroom condo for a month here in Ixtapa.

We were able to park Igor on the condo property, and they showed us around their "home" for the next month. They only arrived on Saturday.

We're just not beach people!

We've been on the coast a total of six days... but we're ready to head inland! 

Our legs are covered in bug bites. A few from mosquitoes, but mostly no-see-ums. They're the ones that bite you but the itchy bumps don't show up until two days later.

It finally arrived!

Regular readers might remember that Igor's new furnace had an issue when we returned from the high altitude at Hidalgo at the end of November. The manufacturer in Canada has been great with their after sales service, and offered to send us another unit with different software installed. The new unit arrived by FedEx in Toluca, Mexico on December 4th.

And it's been stuck there ever since!

We haven't been here since January 2012

We moved on to the city of Lazaro Cardenas (pop 200,000), but only for a stop at the Walmart store there. 

They had height barriers at all the entrances, but we managed to find parking on a side street, and were lucky that we were totally in the shade. It's hot in this area!

We ended up in a great spot!

But what a driving day we had! That section of MEX200 between Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas sure has a lot of curves.

We haven't done that part of the highway since 2011, and at that time we were headed in the opposite direction. It took us five hours (including a one hour stop for lunch) to do 175 kms (108 miles).

Stopped by a highway protest

We're going to be doing an operating mine site visit next week, but the dates weren't written in stone. And we were also trying to meet up with Canadian friends who will be vacationing in Ixtapa.

The mining people got back to me with a January 19th date, which wasn't ideal. We had been hoping for two days later on the 21st.

One section of the road had some magnificent views

As our regular readers know, we're not big beach people. But, we do enjoy a week, or two at the most. So yesterday we made our way down the twisty, windy highway MEX80 to the dusty beach town of Melaque/San Patricio.

We got going just before 10am, with a plan to arrive just after 12 noon.

Camping with armed guards

We headed out yesterday morning at around 10:30am. A little bit of a plate start, but we knew we were only going to be driving about three hours.

First stop was for gasoline, at 23.98 pesos ($1.86 CAD) per liter. That's the equivalent of $5.07 USD per gallon.

Avoid non essential travel!

I belong to several travel forums on the internet, and one newbie traveler posted the current travel warnings for Mexico. 

The Canadian government says that the area we are headed to is listed as "Avoid non-essential travel!"

Your safety and security could be at risk. You should think about your need to travel to this country, territory or region based on family or business requirements, knowledge of or familiarity with the region, and other factors. If you are already there, think about whether you really need to be there. If you do not need to be there, you should think about leaving.

Where to next?

We had been planning a full week here in Etzatlan, but we're thinking we're going to head out tomorrow (Monday), a day early. 

We're heading down to the coast, but we're taking a route we've never done before.

Mexico is no longer the bargain it was, but it's still far cheaper than Canada!

Our week here is going by quickly. In fact, time itself seems to be going by quickly... we're already 1/3 of the way through January!

We walked into town the last two days. Ruth's cheap phone was having charge cable connection problems, so we needed to find a cellphone repair place.

What new countries do we want to visit?

Following on yesterdays post about countries we've been to, but don't feel the need to return to, someone suggested we should list the new countries that we really want to visit.

And there are a lot of them!