Of Boys & Their Busses

Yesterday morning we packed up and left Miramar relatively early. Not real early but we got away in decent time. We couldn't leave real early because there was a bus parked in our way. They have some pretty neat busses down here - Irizar for example. There was one of them showed up in the campground last week with a load of kids from Mexico DF. They must have been on some kind of school tour. The bus was gorgeous. Yesterday it was a Busscar that was blocking the gate. They're pretty cool looking too but while I was admiring their bus the drivers were admiring our bus too. I could see them watching me getting ready to leave and finally they got up the nerve to come over and introduce themselves. We had a short visit during which we each complimented the other's busses. Evidently they had never seen a bus conversion and they were curious about why we had hoses (sewer & water) extending out from the bus. I said "they" because high end busses down here always have two drivers. They even have a sleeping compartment built into the baggage area so that one driver can catch some rest on the road.

We had a pretty good run up here to Guasave. It was frustrating in the early going. People who have never been down here talk about not wanting to come for fear of banditos. What they don't understand is that they don't need to worry about banditos - they do however need to worry about topes and revisions. Yesterday morning we got revisioned nearly to death by various levels of police and soldiers in search of contraband with varying levels of scrutiny at each location. And we slowed down for topes at innumerable little towns along the way. But we stayed on the free roads until we got to Culiacan late in the afternoon, just at dusk. At that point we were 150 km from Guasave & I had just about had enough of topes and revisions so we hopped on the cuota (toll-road) and ran the rest of the way to Guasave on the pay-as-you-go program. It cost us 358 pesos (about $36) to run 154 km but it was worth every cent of it.

Today we had a look at the property that Adrianna phoned us about. There's not much there but they didn't want much for it either. So we went into Guasave & met with a lawyer just so I could get an idea about what additional charges we might face. It didn't sound too ominous so Adrianna phoned the owner back but he now claims that he has 3 potential buyers for the property and we are not at the top of the list. Que sera sera. As it turns out there is another piece of property available here at the beach - I suspect it is one of many that are available - we are going to look at it tomorrow. In theory it has power, water, sewer and in its case the power is actually present on the property - ie. you don't have to run a cord across the road to the neighbour's whenever you want lights as we would have had to at the first place. Stay tuned.

When we got back to Tavo's park tonight the power was still out at our site and the others in the immediate vicinity. According to Adrianna & Carlos Juan the reason Karla had her falling out with Tavo when she worked for him was because he never paid his bills. Karla eventually paid his power bill with her personal funds one day to prevent them from turning off the power to the park. Then she waited 8 months for Tavo to reimburse her. So it may be a while before Tavo is able to get someone to come fix the electrical panel if he has the same payment plan with all his suppliers. Its a good thing we have a generator.

The power was out at our site and all the neighbouring sites when we left this morning but I didn't think much of it because the night watchman claimed that it was out all over the park so I assumed it must be a larger problem. Tonight though the lights are on on the other side and in the hotel but we still didn't have power. Maybe tomorrow I'll offer to fix it for him. I continue to be amazed by how little people of means down here understand about fixing really basic stuff that Canadian homeowners would generally never consider hiring someone else to do. My guess is that there is a wire burned off at one of the main breakers in his panel or possibly even just a poor connection but evidently no one bothered to do even that basic of a look see all day today.