Bill and Cathy McArthur on the Road 2004: 8

     Saturday, February 14 was celebrated as St. Valentine's Day in Mexico as in the U.S. Our Wagon Master and Tail Gunner couples presented all of us in the group with candy to celebrate the holiday. The early morning brought some rain into the resort from the Gulf, but was over by the time we had a 9:00 AM meeting to discuss Sunday's travel plans. Cathy, Bill, and Phyllis drove into Campeche in order to visit an Internet Café and to do some shopping. We returned to the resort by lunch time. Bill tried some fishing after lunch with no luck while Cathy sat by the pool. We relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon. We drove back into Campeche to meet Larry and Nancy at the zócalo at 7:00 PM. We ate a mediocre meal at an open, second story restaurant with a good view of the town square. Although the food wasn't very good, the view of the activities in the square was excellent. Campeche, and Mexico in general, was ramping up for the celebration of Carnival, culminating the night before Ash Wednesday. There were lots of people in the streets and they were in a festive mood. We headed back to Club Nautico at around 9:30 PM. 

    During the night, some extremely intense rain disturbed the sleep of many of our Fantasy Tour group. Inside of our camper it sounded as if one of our neighbors was spraying us with a fire hose. Bill donned his heavy weather slicker for the Sunday morning post-breakfast camp breaking activities. The rainfall lessened, but our camper was sopping wet outside (the inside stayed dry) and had to be packed down that way. Our group started moving out of the sites for hooking up tow cars at 7:30 AM and we were on the road by 8:00 AM. We had a short 108 mile trip with good roads to our next destination, the ruins at Uxmal. We arrived around 11:00 AM and parked in an overflow lot for the ruins. We had very limited space, so the rigs were very close to one another. Needless to say, we were dry camping for this campground. We discovered that one of our beds was wet from packing in the rain, so we opened every window in the camper to dry everything. After lunch we made several phone calls to family members to try to catch up on family news. We spent the afternoon relaxing in and at the swimming pool of the hotel at the ruins. Bill not only got in a cooling swim, but also counted it as the day's shower. After happy hour, the group attended a light show in the ruins. The show was visually impressive, but the narrative we received in English via headsets was not very informative about the history of the ruins site. After the show, many in the group had a fixed price (100 pesos) meal at one of the site's restaurants. Many of us were surprised by the looks of our dishes. For example, some of us ordered a soup translated as "rice and egg with fried plantains." This dish came out as a mound of rice with a couple of fried plantains, covered over by a fried egg. There was nothing soupy about the dish. For the money, most in the group were satisfied with their meals. Although the day had been hot, the night cooled off enough that we ran our heater in the camper.

    Monday morning we were to take a guided tour of the ruins at Uxmal. After breakfast, we packed up the camper and were set for the road by the time the tour started at 8:00 AM. Our guide was a Mayan named Gregorio. He spoke perfect English and was very knowledgeable about Mayan history and the ruins. We toured the extensive site until 9:30 AM with our guide and then toured without the guide for another half hour or so. We were surprised at how well preserved the excavated buildings are, especially since they are constructed of materials subject to erosion. At 11:30 AM, our caravan headed out toward Mérida, the largest city on the Yucatan and its capital. Our drive only took about an hour and a half. The new campground, Rainbow Trailer Park, has water, electric, and sewer, but the electric is mostly low voltage. We continued to use propane to run our refrigerator. We were able to drop off laundry and buy 5 gallons of cooking water. Then we shopped at Carrefour for some food items. Eight of us, in a two car caravan, went into the city to eat dinner. Driving in Mérida at night was more of an adventure than we needed. The other cars on the roads whizzed around us and we heard the sounds of many horns honking as we tried to locate a downtown hotel and restaurant recommended by a guidebook. We couldn't find the restaurant that we were hoping to use, but we had satisfactory meals at another restaurant on the road out of town. 

    Tuesday was mostly cloudy and cool in Mérida. We took an hour's walk along the highway into town and in some large parking lots after breakfast. At 9:00 AM, the group boarded an open air bus for a city tour. As we headed toward the center of the city, we were amazed at the number of upscale car dealerships: Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes, Peugeot, Chevrolet, Toyota, Honda, ... Also remarkable were the familiar restaurants: McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Wendy's, Carl Jr., Dominoes, ... Many of the businesses had signs in English on them as well. The bus took us by many large mansions built in a variety of styles. We also saw many old churches as befits a colonial city. We had a long stop at the central plaza where we walked around and did some shopping. We returned around 1:00 PM and ate lunch in the camper. Afterward, we walked to a nearby Liverpool department store. This store is the equivalent of Sachs and was filled with well-dressed sales people and very few customers. We enjoyed cappuccinos in the second floor restaurant. We walked further down the highway to a large shopping mall which reminded us of the Larios Centro in Malaga, Spain. Attached to the mall was a store named Comercial Mexico, which included a very comprehensive supermarket. We were able to locate some items that we'd been searching for, including zip-lock baggies. We bought a birthday present for our daughter-in-law Stacy at a Sanborn's in the mall. The store was unable to process either of our credit cards, so we used cash for the purchase. We'll have to test the cards in another store to see if the problem is with us or them. We walked back to the campground and got ready for the evening. The group re-boarded the open air bus for a trip to a restaurant for dinner. We sat at one very long table and had a good and entertaining meal. At the conclusion of the meal, the waiters put on a dramatic show of preparing Mayan Coffee by pouring flaming liquor in a multi-level cascade into the coffee glasses. The night was cool as we returned to the campground on our breezy bus. Wednesday was to be a free day, so there were many plans in the works for shopping excursions and side trips.

        Bill and Cathy