Puerto Penasco

Woke up with the temperature still at 15 C; the first time in the trip that the furnace has not run once during the night.  We cleaned up the Accord, got our passports and Mexican information together and headed for the border with a mix of anticipation and trepidation.  At Lukeville, we filled with cheap american gas, and bought insurance for the Accord for the day, and headed across.  Anticlimactic.  Two nice young Mexican girls in blue asked Kirk’s name, asked for his rabies vaccination certification, read it, asked that next time we have an extra copy for their records, and waved us on into Mexico.  Maybe a minute, total, since there was no line up. 

We stopped at the first ATM we saw in Sonoyta, and were immediately set upon by two young boys cleaning our windows.  We were there a while, while Nancy confirmed that it was not her inexperience with the machine that was netting zero results, but the fact that the machine was broken.  The boys finished the first go round and starting detailing their initial job, including cleaning the side mirrors.  We gave them $2 US, which resulted in big smiles from them and their handler, who suddenly appeared.  We decided to wait and hit an ATM in Puerto Penasco.  The highway south on the Mexican side (Highway 8) was in great shape, better than Highway 85 on the American side. An hour down the road, and we were in Puerto Penasco, on the Sea of Cortez!  We had the co-ordinates for The Reef RV Park punched into the Garmin, but construction blocking both major routes, with no hint of a detour, had us navigating the town by the seat of our pants.  We got to The Reef and checked out the facilities and prices.  We worked our way along the waterfront to Playa Bonita RV Park, and then to Playa Del Oro RV Park.  Prices were similar, waterfront serviced sites were $200/week and not waterfront serviced sites were $120.  We chose these parks from the crowd because they all offered wifi and showers.  They all had room, and Puerto Penasco itself had a hang-dog atmosphere, like when the bottom dropped out in the US in 2008, it had never quite recovered.  We stopped at a bank for Pesos, and walked across to a town park hamburgeria for traditional Mexican burger and fries and sat under the trees at a red plastic table and chairs for lunch.  A large non-Mexican walked over, told us he had the biggest house in Choya, 8 stories, most of it.  He then told us we should buy something in the area, that his wife was the best real estate agent in the area, warned us to keep an eye on our stuff, or “they" would steal it, hopped on his quad and bored off into traffic.

Since my Garmin was still behaving badly, or at least, inconsistently, I marked all three RV Parks as “saved places” for future reference. Then home we came, to Organ Pipe CNM for a nap and a drink (but not in that order).  Pictures?  Uh, I was driving…