El Fuerte - 2nd post today

Second post today.

We left Huatabampito at 10:15 this morning. We drove 108 miles and arrived at El Fuerte at 1:45.  3 ½ hours. At lot of it at 5 miles per hour. A very interesting trip to say the least.

As you can guess the TelCel is working great here – thank goodness. The electricity at the park is a little iffy – but right now the AC is running fine. When we first plugged it it blew every thing out. And popped the circuit breaker in Jennie. Alls fine for now - fingers crossed.
So why did it take so long to get here? Well the first 15 miles from Huatabampo to the main road the 15D is a horrid horrid road. Almost as bad as the one from Kino. We didn’t remember it as being quite so bad. Next time we go in or out of Huatabampo we will take the other road even though it is 25 miles longer and has a toll booth.
For some reason the police – state, federal and agricultural were out in force today.

At least five road blocks. Usually we just got waved through. At one we got stopped though. The officer came up to the window and said, “Are you Mexican?”  What? Bill answered, “Do we look Mexican?” Would you believe the officer answered “Yes.” Bill replied, “We’re American.” Mind you all this was in English. Finally the officer just waved us on. What was that all about? Maybe wanted to practice his English? Don’t know, don’t care.
We are now in the state of Sinaloa.

Made good time while on the main highway. We took the turn off to El Fuerte and got about four blocks when we ran into construction. Major construction – there was NO road. There was a muddy dirt road to the right of the construction but it only went a few hundred feet before it turned out of sight. We stopped and pondered. Then Bill asked a man sitting on the side of the road how to get to El Fuerte – the man indicated the dirt track. Straight and around the corner. Okay! Off we went. Around the corner was this. A graded (washboard) dirt and gravel, I don’t want to call it a road, but anyway path.

If traffic was coming towards us Bill pulled over as much as he could and stopped. And this was the good part of the road.
Then it got a little narrower with of course a canal on our side. Lovely.

Looking down right outside my window – that is the canal!

Then we had to make right turn.

Across this “oh shit” bridge?

And then a left turn. But this one wasn’t marked so again we stopped and waited for another vehicle to come by so Bill could ask them, “Is this the way to El Fuerte?”

Yep! And then the ROAD got really narrow. Before we could make the turn on to this stretch of road we had to wait for on coming traffic to pass us. And for some strange reason the last on coming pick up decided to just stop on the road. In the mean time traffic was backing up to our left as they couldn’t turn because we were in the middle of the road – ‘cause Bill had to swing way out to make our right turn. Finally the pick up started up and went on down the road. We turned and the traffic jam let up. Talk about a Mexican Standoff. Luckily we only met two cars on this stretch. If we’d met a truck we both would have been SOL!

And then we had to make another left turn – if we’d been in the Alfa he would have had to unhook the car to make this turn. As it was we barely made it.

But at least we were back on the highway. The last 20 miles were pretty good.

But by now I was really worried that the little hotel RV park we stayed at two years ago would be closed. It was pretty iffy then.
Was sure glad to see it was still open and very surprised to see two BIG rigs already there. From Canada.

So right now The Driver is resting and I’m writing. Later we will go into town to see if the Churro Man is still there. Sure hope so. Bill deserves one.