{"id":2287,"date":"2015-03-21T18:08:21","date_gmt":"2015-03-22T00:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/?p=2287"},"modified":"2016-09-07T19:39:15","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T16:39:15","slug":"today-was-an-expensive-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/today-was-an-expensive-bust\/","title":{"rendered":"Today Was an Expensive Bust"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was up early to get L&N’s friend to the airport and was on the road heading to Maz by about 8:15. I had planned to spend part of the day at village called El Quelite a little north of Maz, but made an irreversible and expensive mistake: I got on the cuota (toll road) instead of the libre (free road). It doesn’t matter that it took me ages to realise that I wouldn’t be able to access the town from the cuota, I still ended up having to practically go halfway to Culiac\u00e1n before I could turn around. This meant I had to go through the toll booth in both directions, which cost 109 pesos EACH WAY!!! \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Pole Palace night club sounds like a very classy establishment.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Mexican<\/a>

Mexican open top double decker bus… Yes, those are people poking out of the top of it!<\/p><\/div>\n

When I was finally able to turn around, it was at an oasis along the barren road, a Pemex\/OXXO combo, where I was very glad to have access to a bathroom (which had paper, water, and soap, but no toilet seat) and to be able to get a coffee (which tasted not great; I’ve been so spoiled by Rico’s!).<\/p>\n

Turning around, I thought I could salvage the day by visiting some petroglyphs L&N had mentioned and the access road for which I had passed on the way north, but this being the first day of spring, there were massive<\/em> crowds. I was almost 5KM down the dirt track to the location when a cop signaled for me to pull over. I did so and he spoke very quickly to me.<\/p>\n

I said, \u00bf<\/span>Mande? and he looked at a loss for words and managed to get out in English that he doesn’t speak English. I shook my head and said that if he spoke slowly and used simple words I would understand. He tried again and I repeated what I had understood: I had to go to the end of the road, go around the parking lot, come back up the track, and park at the head of a long queue of cars. The cop grinned and said exactly.<\/p>\n

So that’s what I did and let’s just say I had no desire to park almost 6KM from the entrance and hike down to something I had no details about when it was obviously a special day and people were heading out for the whole of it, with parasols and coolers.<\/p>\n

I made it back to the cuota and drove straight to the Soriana off Mex-15 that I went to in December<\/a>. I actually wanted to check out Mega, but did not have the energy at this point to brave the traffic down Rafael Buelna.<\/p>\n

Soriana didn’t have much or, rather, I’m not in the mood to cook, so I pretty much just stocked up on paper goods, crackers, sliced ham, and kielbasa. Something told me to check my email before going into the store and I had a tiny order from Contessa, that I was able to fill. I am always glad to do that for people! When I would do my supply runs to\u00a0 Whitehorse, I would often have full huge lists of shopping for people, hundreds of dollars’ worth… and I would have the favour returned when others did their supply runs.<\/p>\n

I dropped Contessa’s things off and got in around 2:30. I had a beer while I read a bit, then I decided I was hungry and moved my reading to the El Velero restaurant where I made the mistake of filling up on chips (damn their awesome pico de gallo!) and limonda, not leaving me much room for my chicken tacos. So I brought most of the tacos home and will have a nice breakfast tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Not counting any expenditures from Soriana onward, my day cost me about 500 pesos in tolls and fuel with absolutely nothing to show for it. Very disappointing. If I wasn’t driving such a gas guzzler, I would have enjoyed the drive, something I haven’t done much this winter, but all I could focus on was the gas gauge needle dipping lower and lower and lower. If El\u00a0 Quelite had had anything really remarkable to see, I might have made a point to find my way to the libre and gone there after all, but there was really nothing that spectacular to see to justify the extra mileage.<\/p>\n

I wish I had a navigator.\u00a0 You can’t drive and navigate here, it’s too dangerous. A navigator would have been looking at the map for me and telling me to stay in the left lane while I worked at avoiding getting into an accident.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I wish I had done what I wanted to do today: come home from the airport and go back to bed with a book. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was up early to get L&N’s friend to the airport and was on the road heading to Maz by about 8:15. I had planned to spend part of the day at village called El Quelite a little north of Maz, but made an irreversible and expensive mistake: I got on the cuota (toll road) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[815,14,635,814,3],"tags":[642,794],"class_list":["post-2287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mazatlan","category-mexico","category-north-america","category-sinaloa","category-travel","tag-airports","tag-restaurants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}