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!

Which countries would we not return to?

One of our regular readers made a comment on our facebook page yesterday... "You’ve been to many countries. Are there some to which you wouldn’t want to return?"

And there are! The question actually prodded me to update our "countries visited" list, which I hadn't done for a couple of years.