2-22-05

Oh, what a day this has been. It started off with me heading south after spending the night in the rock quarry.  I made a quick trip to town to upload my last road log. The spot that I had used before evidently wasn’t turned on yet but I found another one not a block off of the main square. I left town and followed the coast on down. At one point there was a strange looking thing hanging from a tree and when I looked up I saw that it was a banana tree with cute little bananas on it. Almost the next mile I was passing through a small town when I spied this tree along the road.


I had seen one of these for sale at a farmers market and have no idea what it is. It is covered in little sharp points and about the size of a large loaf of bread.

Further down the road I saw several fields that are growing tobacco.

A little further down the road I saw the sheds that they hang the ‘hands’ of tobacco leaves in to cure. The field in front is maize and there is a lot of  it  grown here.

I stopped along the road at one little store and had a soda. He had a sign out front for gasoline. This is his gas station. Two jugs of gas and a homemade funnel out of a pop bottle and a length of hose. Nice clean efficient setup.

Along the highway was a ranch that had some cattle in a pen by the road. These Brahma cattle are about the only ones you see around here.

These are some of the best looking cattle I have seen. Most of them are stick thin and these would be fat in comparison.

I stopped in a little town and saw this little kid riding around on his new push cart bicycle. I though maybe someone had made it for him as I always figured that there must be a back street shop someplace that is modifying bikes into pushcarts.

I guess I was wrong on both counts. In the next town I saw this new for sale bike out front of an appliance/bike store.

These are a mainstay in these little towns. There are people using them for nearly everything. Here is one fairly fresh clean one in use.

Most of them are rather funky. I am not sure what they deal out of them but most have a washtub with a plastic cover pinned to the top and a small charchol fire in another  can suspended below the tub. All around the sides of the tub are condiments. These guys do a good business and travel from place to place or some pick a spot and stay and vend there. Driving to work in one of these?

I came down the street and happened to look in the barred door, no windows, of this place.

It was a nice little shop he had set up. He even had an injector pump on the bench. These guys can do anything. I am in farm country so they need a good injector mechanic and by the signs on the front, he can handle almost anything.

I came around the corner of another block and saw this accident.

The guy driving the tractor had cut the corner too sharp and  had wiped the back steering axel out from under the combine on the lamp post. It would have been fun to watch them figure out what to do. There were several guys in on the project and soon after I snapped this photo a pickup showed up with a half dozen big hunks of logs for blocking. It was going to be a project for sure.

I was walking back to the car and just around the corner I found this upholstery shop.

The guy wasn’t there at the moment but I hung out for a few minutes and sure enough he came out of the hardware store not far off. I asked him to come look. I had him look at the cover on my little folding chair that I picked up in Quartzite last year. I really like the little chair, it is made in Japan and is sturdy. I like it better than those fold up cloth chairs. He said to bring it in. he looked it over and said 50 pesos. I had the choice of black or maroon nagahyde or some sort of gray cloth. Black it was and black it still is. He added a couple of pieces of foam and the whole thing took maybe twenty minutes.
 
He made it a point to grab his air staple gun for  the photo. He never did use it on this chair but I suppose he thinks it looks more professional. He worked in Santa Fe for a year fixing truck tires. That is hard work and he readily agreed.

this is really just a little  bike dressed up to look like a big one. I just saw one of these go by. The guy had on one of those fake German kraut can helmets. He was a big bad biker dude. They are fast enough to pass lil red, but just barely.

There is almost anything you can imagine in these little towns. Here in the back of a pickup are a couple of cows.
 
Around the next corner was a lunch counter and one of the gals was making fresh tortillas in a wooden press. She was so quick I couldn’t get a photo of her actually giving them  a squeeze. The ball of dough goes in the center and the top is hinged over and the lever is pushed down making  a  perfect tortilla she then slides off in her hand and puts on the iron griddle to her right.

I finally made it to Puerta Vallarta. What a mess this is. It was getting late but I figured I could make it through before dark. Wrong!. All I wanted to do was get on through as I knew that was not my kind of town. The pace is fast and I jammed right along with the rest of them and came to what I at first thought was a huge hotel. It is sort of a hotel I guess, it is one of those cruise ships.

I have no idea the size of this thing but it is a Monster. It must be ten or more stories high. The ferry I was on was big but the life boats from this one wouldn’t fit in the ferry. Sorry for the poor photo but I was busy driving here and the traffic was dense as it was getting around five. I made fairly good time  I though going through town and I came to another  one of these boats. What! Oh, no. It was the same boat only I was coming from the other side. I struggled but finally made it and got turned around and headed back, only to come back  to the same boat again! I have no idea what was going on now and it was getting dark. I had gone past a walmart several times and this time I found the road to it and pulled in the parking lot. They let motor homes camp in the parking lot in the US so maybe here too? Sure enough I found four rather large motor homes in the parking lot and pulled in with them. I figure it is better here than out on the road making another loop around and around and never being able to get out of town.

I went into walmart and got some food and  water and went back  out to the parking lot and ate some supper. I could see a couple of guys visiting down the way so I went down and asked if either had ever been here before and if they knew how to get to Mozantilla. It turns out that both of them are from Quebec and speak fairly good English. One guy is going that way in the morning and has said that I should follow him and he will lead me through. That sounds good to me, nothing like a good guide.

2-23-05

It actually was a very good night in the walmart parking lot. I was far removed from the main road and was fairly quiet all night. It was however very humid. When I went in the store I felt the air-conditioning right away and when I came out it was like walking into a locker room after hot showers were thaken. The Quebec guys say that that ‘IS’ Mexico,  welcome!!! They also said that it didn’t start getting good until south of Mazanillo which is a five hour drive he says.