We left Cholula and drove drove about two hours to the well known archeological site of Teotihuacan. Again through iOverlander, we found a place that has an RV park called Mi Mexico Lindo which was only about a 10 minute walk to the Teotihuacan gate.

We spent our first full day at the RV park doing laundry and maintenance.  We hadn’t been anywhere that had both water and drain hookups, so we hadn’t been using our on board washer, and we hadn’t sent the laundry out to be done in over two weeks, so we were due.  Tom got the ladder out and went on the roof to figure out the leak, which he finally figured out  was not from the escape hatch, but from rivet holes that no longer had rivets from the rail’s run-in with the tree in Merida.  Since we travel with tools and caulking, Tom was able to plug the holes, so now we just have to wait for the next rain and hope the leak is fixed.  We’ve also used the time to get some desk work done, like blogging.​

Once we got the necessary work out of the way, we were able to spend the next few days enjoying the area.  We discovered that the RV park is only a mile from the historical town center, so we spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday walking around.  We were really glad that we were in town for the weekend, because we again were delighted to see that while the town center is set up for tourists, most of those tourists are Mexicans enjoying their own country.

On Monday, we decided we had some administrative stuff to get done, like finding insurance for the US.  We thought it could maybe just possibly be as simple as calling Progressive and giving them our credit card number but, alas, nothing is ever that easy.  Instead, Tom spent close to six hours on the phone calling every insurance company, every insurance agent recommended by everyone we know, and following up on every lead we found in online groups.  We hadn’t really thought about it, but we had multiple layers of complications.  When calling US companies, they wanted us to have a US address, which we don’t since we have lived in Belize for over 15 years.  The also wanted the US title for the truck, which was long ago converted to a Belize title.  And, the fact that it isn’t a mass produced motor home made them more than a little twitchy.  Tom finally contacted a German company called Thum Insurance Agency L.L.C, located in Michigan, and they were able to help us because they do this all the time for European overlanders who ship their vehicles to the US in order to drive around for an extended time.  ​

Tom didn’t find this company until fairly late Monday afternoon, so details for our application - which included things like a photo of Tom crawling through the pass-through window between the camper and the cab of the truck to prove that it was possible - didn’t get done until Tuesday morning.  But, we completed the application and sent it off to Michigan, and headed out of Cholula towards Teotihuacan.

We’ve had a busy and challenging week, with a bit of fun and entertainment mixed into the chaos.  We’re still learning about our rig and figuring things out as we go, and each evening as we rate the day, we’re still coming out ahead.

We left Celestun Monday morning.  Even though Celestun is almost to the state of Campeche, which was our next stop, we went back into Merida for three reasons - it was much easier driving than the back roads through Campeche, we needed to restock and we knew how to get around the stores in Merida, and we had to do a last check-in at the hospital.  Everything went great, and we headed south out of Merida on the highway around 2pm, with the plan to get a little bit south of the city of Campeche.​

Suddenly, Tom said it felt like we got hit with a gust of wind, and before we could even do the tree check on the side of the road to see if the leaves were blowing, we heard a very loud boom.  We both thought something had blown off the camper - one of the back doors, or a solar panel, or a roof vent.  Tom pulled over immediately and found that the passenger side inside dually had blown and we had left the tread in the road behind us.  We were lucky because we were only a couple of hundred yards past a truck pull off, and the outside tire was fine, so we were able to slowly back up to a place where we could get off the highway to change the tire.  A road crew was cleaning up the area, so Tom had plenty of help, and we were on our way - driving much more slowly - in only an hour or so.

We spent that night at a Pemex south of Campeche, as originally planned, although we didn’t pull in until almost dark.  We had an uneventful night, and planned to leave in the morning and drive into Villahermosa to get a replacement tire.  The morning drive along the coast was beautiful, and as we were threading our way though Ciudad del Carmen, Tom spotted an Auto Zone where he wanted to stop to get a second jack stand for more stability when changing flat tires, which, in our experience, are very common in Mexico.  He got the jack stand and looked across the street and saw a Goodyear store, so we decided that instead of proceeding to Villahermosa and looking for a place to buy tires, we’d get one there.​

That accomplished, we continued on our way to Villahermosa, where we planned to stay at a small water park. We were almost there, and we both felt a vibration which we attributed to the well worn road.  We stayed for the night, went for a walk and had a leisurely swim in the water park in the morning, and got on the road right after lunch.

We both immediately noticed that the vibration continued no matter what the road surface was like, so we reprogrammed the GPS to take us into Cardenas to look for a tire repair place.  We found one, and the guys there looked at all of our tires and found that the front passenger side tire was bulging.  ​

Now, to back up a bit, when the rear dually blew, Tom immediately suspected that it had been damaged when we hit the bump near Merida and flipped the air ride sensor.  It was the same side, same tire, and Tom’s immediate worry had been the outside dually.  However, when the front tire was bad, he started to rethink the problem. The place where we stopped didn’t sell tires, but they helped change the front tire and we got back on the road heading west.  The truck felt better, but still off, so we decided to divert to the next city, Coatzacoalcos, and find a tire place.  We spent the late afternoon driving around the city, but couldn’t find any place that had more than one or two of the type of tires we needed.  So, we decided to call it quits for the day.

We looked on iOverlander and found a seafood restaurant on the river south of the city that lets overlanders park for the night if they have dinner at the restaurant.  We decided that one last seafood dinner before heading inland was a good idea, so we set the GPS to get us there from Coatzacoalcos.  It had us approaching from the west on the eastbound lane, with a side road exit from the highway that showed a smaller road winding around under the bridge.  As we headed down the small single lane road, we ran into some overhanging branches.  The restaurant was supposedly only a half mile away, so we wandered down the road on foot to see how many branches would need to be trimmed for us to pass.  There weren’t too many, and they weren’t very big, so Tom chopped the branches and we proceeded to the point where the road was clear and rocky and there was a group of houses.  We talked to the people at the houses, who said that we were on a private road, but they could unlock the gate to let us through to the restaurant.  They did, and we found that the real road to the location was an exit and entrance to the westbound lane only, so at least getting back on the highway in the morning would be easy.


Getting into the restaurant was a tight fit, but Tom got us backed into the space where we were told to go, and we had a delicious dinner, a couple of beers, and a great night’s sleep.  In the morning, Tom took a look at all of the tires and found that the inside of the driver’s side dually had a suspicious bulge, much like the front tire we’d already changed.  We decided to head towards Puebla, but to stop at the next major city, Cordoba, to look for tires. ​

That done, we continued into Cordoba where we planned to park in a Walmart/Sam’s Club parking lot, hoping that the Sam’s Club would have tires.  We got lucky; on the way through the city streets to the Walmart, Tom spied a tire store and we pulled in to inquire about tires.  They had six of the type of tire we needed, so we spent the rest of the afternoon having all of the tires on the truck changed. While we were there we had a torrential thunder shower, and it was after 5 by the time they finished, so we continued down the road to the Walmart, where we parked for the night.  ​

In the morning, before continuing on to Puebla, we took a walk through the city streets.  We knew we were in the mountains because we’d been chilly the night before when the temperature went down to 60F, but it wasn’t until we looked up towards the end of the street and saw a snow covered peak that we realized how high we were.  The snow covered peak was the inactive volcano Pico de Orizaba, which, at 18,491’, is the third highest peak in North America.

We left Cordoba and headed for Puebla.  The GPS said it was 115 miles, and a little over 2 hours.  We made it through the very twisty and mountainous pass slowly, but without incident.  We pulled over a couple of times to let the truck cool down, although when Tom got on line and looked into acceptable temperature levels, he felt that we would have been fine going on without the rest stops…although the rest stops also helped to turn down the anxiety level a few notches.  When we got through the pass, we were on a highway that was a straight line into Puebla, and the GPS said we had about 40 minutes to go, which would have had us to our destination in under 3 hours, which is pretty close to the GPS estimate by our slow moving standards. ​

Then, Siri told us that there was an accident ahead, and suggested rerouting.  We looked at the suggested reroute, which appeared to go through some less than major roads, and decided that we would risk the accident holdup rather than find ourselves on roads that were too narrow or had too many overhanging trees or wires.  We’ll never know if that would have been the case, but in the end we ended up sitting on that stretch of road for over 3 hours, until we finally passed the two double semis who had sideswiped each other and torn open their trailers.​

Thanks again to iOverlander, we had found an RV campground near Puebla, and the GPS guided us directly to it.  We pulled in and drove where the guard told us to go, just in time for the rain to turn to hail.  Everybody ran for cover, and we hunkered down until it stopped.  Then, they told us that it would be better to park in another section of the park, so we went through another gate and found ourselves in a large yard with complete choice of campsites.  We backed up in the first site next to the gate, passed the dogs through the window into the camper so they wouldn’t have to go out in the rain, and ran into the camper ourselves. 

​We started sighing with relief that we had made it through a long day when we heard dripping inside the camper.  We looked at the vents, which are the first suspects for leaks, and found the drip on the large escape vent over the bed…and it was dripping on the bed.  Tom jumped up and got some towels on the drip and stopped it as best he could from the inside, and we settled in for the evening.  We found that most of the water had ended up on one of the pillows which acted like a big sponge, so the bed wasn’t actually wet, but we still decided to extend our two nights at the RV park to three or four to give us time to do some maintenance, and be tourists in the Puebla/Cholula area.

We’ve spent a few lovely days in Celestun.  We planned to head back to Merida today, Sunday, but we’ve so enjoyed ourselves here that we decided to spend another night and head back to Merida tomorrow morning.  

The town is very quiet.  It’s a fishing town, and they make salt.  They don’t seem to have a lot of overnight tourists, but they come for the day in buses from Merida, and while they’re here they look at nature and eat lunch and go to the beach.  But, they’re still very sparse, and the beach in front of the hotel where we’re parked has been really quiet, and we’ve only seen a few people in the nature reserve.  The only problem we’ve had is that when we decided to go out for dinner, we found out that the town rolls up its sidewalks when the tourists leave on the buses around 5, so we barely made it in to a restaurant to eat.

So another three days have passed.  We haven’t done anything super exciting as we’ve waited around for hospital crap, but we also haven’t had anything horrible happen.  We’re waiting on tests that won’t be done until Monday, so after amusing ourselves in Merida for a few days, we headed for the coast to the utterly beautiful little town of Celestun, which is as charming as its name.