Author: keelhauler

Well I haven’t updated my blog since I’ve been just hanging out in my hammock and taking life easy.

We flew back direct from Cleveland to Cancun early New Year’s Day. Flight was ahead of schedule, we just made connections to an early bus from the airport to Playa del Carmen and after a Collectivo ride we were back in camp by 2 PM.

A few more campers had arrived and a few left but there is still room for a few more.

Since we were early Claude was nice enough to give us a quick ride back to the new Super Chedaraui back in Puerto Adventuras.

On Monday Claude and Mags drove to Cancun to pick up their son Stephen and his fiancée Maryann. They are going to spend two weeks here between work schedules on the cruise ship circuit. They work in a store on the ships selling jewelry and watches. Here they are checking out my hammock.

I borrowed all these pictures from Mags camera. I haven’t even taken a picture since I came back.

Claude got Steve to give him a haircut, saving a trip into Playa.

Meet our campground hosts, Vera and Dietrich. Dietrich makes sure everything is working in camp and everybody pays their campground fees. If you stay a month it is only 5000 pesos including all hookups, this only comes to $375/month USD at the current exchange rate.

We all got together this Friday night to go out to Pizza Leos again in Chemuyil. We had 15 people there this Friday. Here is a picture of me telling Glen from Alberta all I know. This took about a minute. But he did seem to believe me.

It seems like there is always a celebration or a party or something going on in town.

This Friday was the Feast of the Three Kings. All the bakeries make big bread like cakes that have a small toy Jesus somewhere inside. It’s called Rosca de Reyes. If you find him in your slice, tradition says you must throw a party on Feb. 2, Candlemas Day, and serve tamales to your guests. Or I think that’s how it goes. The cakes are not too tasty, we tried a small piece in the grocery store.

But of course it is also the reason for another celebration. The ladies in town dress up in their beautiful Huipiles, they have their dancing shoes on and they march behind a car playing music and dance around a man holding a king, while holding on to their ribbons.

Even some little ones dressed the part.

It’s a fun little town, when ever we walk around town we usually find a party going on. Here we found a birthday party with a piñata. All the kids were having a great time trying to break it to get at the candy.

These are the friends from Belgium that we met at our campground. Fred & Emmy are the ones who had a bad experience on their way to Mahahual last February .

We have been back to Xpu-Ha for 19 days and I have only posted one time. My friends are complaining, they want to hear what’s happening in dangerous Mexico.

The reason this is the fourth year in a row that we have spent at least part of our winter here is that not much does happen. A few campers come & go, we listen to the live entertainment a few day’s a week coming from the popular beach restaurant right next to us, and on Fridays go to Pizza Leo’s in Chemuyil.

So here are the comings and goings of our camper friends.

Reed & Elaine from New Mexico arrived on on 1/10 in their new 34’ fifth wheel. They are pulling it with a 4-wheel drive pickup truck. After Fred & Emmy left for Belize and points south, they took over their spot.

Elaine bought a new inflatable kayak with a sail rig that they hope to learn how to sail in our protected bay.

Whenever the wind calms down I am still taking my kayak out and over to Puerto Adventuras just for the exercise. It takes about an hour each way.

Gerry and Ann arrived on 1/11, with a new (for them) 20 year old RV that they hope to leave here at La Playa. They were stuck in Texas for more than a month because they had never cancelled their old 10 year RV permit when they left last year. They had at least one un-cancelled permit in each of their names from RV’s that they sold back in Ontario,

The only way they actually got to get a new permit this year was to sell the RV to Ann’s son-in-law Rick, fly him down to TX, then let him get the TIP in his name. He visited for a week and flew back home on 1/15.

They plan to stay until April and fly home. Then in the future they can fly back and forth to their RV,

Gerry figured to get around he will need some transportation so he bought a Mexican made Italian scooter and a kids bike trailer. He can carry groceries and laundry from the Puerto Adventuras about 3 mi away.

Here he is setting up his satellite dish so we will be able to watch the Super Bowl in a few weeks.

Claude & Erika arrived back from Switzerland. They also flew home from the holidays but left their RV at Meco Loco near Cancun, When they got back Claude got bit by a dog vey near where I got bit two years ago. So it slowed their return to La Playa until 1/13. They are camped up on the beach again on the other side of the restaurant. No full hookups up there but a nice breeze and beautiful view.

There is another campground right next store to us run by the same family called Bonanza. They have nice shady spots and cater to smaller rigs and tent campers. Some electric is available. Here is what we look like so far this year. Starting on left, picture 1 to the far right, picture 2. It’s a rather small campground.

Claude & Mags son Steve & Maryann flew back to Ontario on 1/16.

So far, since the beginning of December, the weather has been averaging in low 80’s during day and high 60’s at night. Got a few warmer and a few cooler days and it rained for a couple of days. But mostly any rain lasts a for only few minutes then clears right back up again.

Elaine & Reed preparing for their maiden voyage.

Pretty much all of us are using USB sticks in our computers to get Telcel’s 3G service. Telcel lowered their price this year and even ran a special for new people. You get the stick and two months service for $399 pesos, about $30 USD. After that depending on how much bandwidth you use, the cost is $300-500 Pesos per month. Their signal is reachable in most populated areas of Mexico and is fairly fast.

So it’s 3S – Sunny, Safe and Swell here on the beach in MX. Some day we may be home. If something exciting happens I’ll post some more but my posts will be a little sporadic until we start heading home in March.

I haven’t been doing many updates lately. Partly because every week it’s about the same. Peggy & I take an about a 2 1/2 mi. early morning beach walk. We take a break under the palapas and then come back to the RV to read our books on our two Kindle’s. The Kindle’s sure have cut down on a lot of book weight. We brought bags full of paper back books in the past and traded with people as we traveled. Now, I downloaded about 100 books. Whatever you buy or get free on one Kindle is available for no charge on any other Kindle registered to the same Amazon account.

About two weeks ago Reed & Elaine’s children & grandchildren flew in for a one week visit. They had a great time. The only problem is that several of them were in various stages of the Flu which I guess is running rampant in Albuquerque. After a few days I came down with a good case of the Flu. I was sick and feeling miserable for about a week. Peggy did fine and gave me some good care.

.When I got better, even the beach brightened up with a big rainbow. Speaking of the weather, this is the place to be a weather forecaster. It’s pretty much the same everyday. Low 67oF – High 84oF with a 30% chance of rain. Some days it’s very windy with big waves, other days if the light wind is out of the West the ocean is like glass.

After I was feeling better I got my kayak out again for a little exercise. It’s fun to paddle up to Puerto Adventuras or paddle into some of the Cenotes that dump right into the ocean. The campground this year has been almost 100% occupied everyday. We have had several pass though on their way to travels in Central America or across the rest of Mexico. Most of us just stay put for the Winter.

Our plans are to leave here on March 1st. We will head directly to the border and go to see an insurance adjuster in McAllen, TX to see what they will pay for the damage that we did to RV when we were in Ciudad Valles.

Sunrise from the campground, we took warning and it did rain later.

 

On weekends Mexican campers come in and camp near Claude and Erika from Switzerland.

We take a walk on the beach every morning past this little Mexican Craft stand and Peggy has never ventured near it to see what they may be selling

This winter whenever we got an East wind the sea grass piled up on the beach. The beach is normally nice white sand, but on some mornings we would find piles of weeds over 2′ high. You had a hard time walking in the water around the piles. Depending on the exact wind direction these weeds would pile up in different places each day. One thing the weeds did do was to provide lots of work for the Mexican laborers. Sometimes they dug holes in the sand and buried the weeds. At other times they would carry it away in wheel barrows and dump them above the high water line.

The beach is nearly 1-1/2 miles long. So we would walk up to the North end and take a short rest. This is as far as you can go, It is the start of an old hurricane damaged resort, and their guards will stop you if you go beyond this point.

We then walk down to the South end where there are some old palapas from another abandoned resort. We made ourselves some benches from scrap wood and marked it off with rocks like it belonged to us. Mags & Peggy enjoying the bench.

Believe it or not but hardly anyone ever messed with our names the whole Winter. Once it destroyed by high waves and another time by some weekend campers.

This past Sunday we took a ride with Claude & Mags to visit Glen at his place in Tankah. It’s about 20 mi away. Glen is planning to drive his rig out of Mexico when Claude leaves. It was getting around dinner time when we left so we stopped at a nice upscale (for us) restaurant called Oscar & Lalo’s. The place has lots of ambience and the food was excellent.

It’s 1400 miles from Xpu-Ha back to the US border. It took us 3 long days and 1 short day to do it. We started out early in the morning right after sunrise and drove to 4 PM for 3 days. The last day is about 4 hours including border crossing delays. For the trip back we averaged about 40 mph.

This year I couldn’t believe how good the East Coast roads are. Everyone complains about all the potholes and rough pavement especially North of Vera Cruz and South of Tampico. This year the worst road was a Quota (turnpike) near Acayucan. You have to pay for all these bumps?

The small towns south of the Emerald Coast slow you down but some of the recently paved roads are great. Safety? Well we like to travel alone but we are sharing the road with hundreds of cars, buses and trucks so we never felt that there were any danger. We do not travel at night in Mexico.

The biggest surprise this year is that we were never stopped by a traffic policeman looking for a bribe. If you are looking to make the shortest time and don’t like to drive in the mountains and want to save over $100 in tolls, I recommend this route, vs. the route through Puebla.

Our Travel Plan Xpu-Ha to TX was almost dead on each day, One surprise was that the Pemex we stayed at for our last night did not stay open 24 hrs. But they left the light poles on and I think there was a security man in the office. It was one of the quietest stopovers we have had.

We crossed the border at Los Indios on a Sunday morning, if you need to turn in your TIP (Temporary Import Permit), be aware that the Banjercito office is closed on Sundays and doesn’t open until 9AM the rest of the week. Use another crossing if that is a problem. For a change, the US border people were friendly and all smiles. Some years they make you feel like you are a criminal for vacationing in Mexico.

When we got to Harlingen, Peggy practically jumped out of the RV. Look at all those stores “Kohl’s, Target, Wal-Mart and a huge mall”. She was going to hit them all, while I used the internet. She actually finished shopping before I finished playing with the computer. Tomorrow I need to contact the USA agent for the Mexican insurance company to see where we will have the damage estimate done. It turns out that they now consider the damage done to our RV to be due to a collision which is covered and not a road hazard which is not covered. I’ll see what is really going to happen, the Texas claims guy has not been the easiest to work with but the head of claims in Mexico City was very helpful.

We went out to dinner at our favorite Bar-B-Q place in San Benito, TX called Longhorn Cattle Company, my favorite is the all you can eat bean soup which comes free with all meals, and the Beef Brisket which comes with potato salad and coleslaw. I think that Archie’s Ribs back home near Deep Creek has better ribs.

Maybe this is why they call it Long Horn, these guys are grazing out behind the restaurant.

Tomorrow we will fill our propane tank with Propane as opposed to Butane which is what they sell in Mexico. Butane has no pressure below 32oF, so it doesn’t work well in cold climates. The place is right near the mall.

After the insurance adjuster tells us where to take the RV, we will head up to Houston to spend some time with my cousin Rich and his family.