Travel with Kevin and Ruth: We haven't been here since January 2012

Saturday, January 17, 2026

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 did our shopping and then were sitting in Igor about to have some lunch when a guy walking by poked his head in the window to say hello. His English was about as good as our Spanish, so we had a little conversation using both languages.

He's a marine here in Mexico, but he's on leave and his family lives here. It's interesting that while the Canadian government says to avoid travel in this area, this guy says it's totally safe. And of course we knew that.

Lazaro Cardenas is a big shipping port, so lots of truck traffic. There is a toll highway that would have probably saved us 15 minutes, but also cost money. We took the free road expecting there to be a lot of traffic, but it was totally quiet so that was a good choice.

Crossing the bridge into the state of Guerrero.

We haven't been to the beach town of Playa Troncones since January 2012! Back then, there was a small RV park, and several beachfront restaurants where you could park for 100 pesos a night. Some of those options still exist, but prices have more than doubled (which is still really cheap), so we decided to see what free options were aviable. So we drove a little further down the road.

We found a major housing development going in, but they were still in the process of selling the lots. The sales office is just a big palapa, and it looked like they had gone home for the day. There was a perfect parking spot beside an expensive rental home.