San Miguel de Allende
to Bucerias
—Blogpost written by Bob
In this blogpost, we continue our 6-month winter excursion in Mexico. We arrived by car in San Miguel de Allende (SMA) on October 15, traveling from near Annapolis, Maryland where we live on our sailboat. This blogpost described our road trip from San Miguel de Allende to Bucerias (near Puerto Vallarta) where we will spend our last two months of this season in Mexico.
Monday, January 31
San Miguel de Allende to Tonala
We left our apartment in San Miguel de Allende at 9:07 AM, almost an hour earlier than planned. It was a mere 58 degrees F outside. We stopped by La Comer on our way out of San Miguel de Allende to pick up a few things we might need when we arrive in Bucerias tomorrow.
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Our new-to-us GPS worked fine until after the first 30 minutes of today’s trip—then, the need for a map update became obvious. (We used our cell phone for the middle of today’s trip. Once we got near Leon the toll road was old enough to be on the version of the map we had in our GPS. The trip went fine all the way to Tonalá until we missed a turn as we entered Tonala—then we had to backtrack about 2 miles through city traffic. (Tonala is a city-like section of Guadalajara, which is similar in size to a the Bronx section of New York City.) Of course we hit bottom on almost every one of the speed bumps in town because of our car’s low clearance, particularly when heavily loaded like we were.
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We arrived at our hotel at about 3 PM. (So, this supposed 4-hour trip took about 5 hours.) We parked our car across the street from the hotel until we got checked in, after which we were able to move it inside a garage owned by the hotel. The area of the city looked pretty rough just outside our hotel but the inside was like an oasis! We had two (opening) windows in our room that overlooked an attractive courtyard below. The hotel had a total of only sixteen rooms.
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| The view of the courtyard through our room windows. |
The tile floors of our hotel room still felt cold, despite the fact that we had really warmed up during the day’s trip and the two vodka and tonic drinks (which we had on arrival tentatively numbed our senses).
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The elevation of Guadalajara is 5,100 feet above sea level, a drop of roughly 1,000 feet from the elevation of San Miguel de Allende where we just departed. The shortness of breath common in the high altitude of San Miguel is not noticeable here. Also, the humidity seems to be a bit higher here (50% today). All in all, the atmospheric conditions are more favorable here, at least for me. I can see why this area is more highly populated (5.3 million people in 2021 but still smaller than New York City with its 8.8 million people in 2021). (Driving through Guadalarja reminds me of driving on I-95 through New York City.)
Tuesday, February 1
Tonala to Bucerias
We woke up around 8 AM. We went to the lobby to have a complimentary cup of coffee—there was neither decaf nor cream.
After a cup of black coffee we walked a couple blocks to find a local eatery.
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| The early morning streets in Tonala were empty. |
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| A woman sweeps the street in front of her Tonala shop. |
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| The only place we could find that was open for breakfast in our section of Tonala. |
The only thing on the menu board was small, medium, or large (in Spanish)—we ordered two mediums with meat.
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| Two women prepare items for meals. |
The meat turned out to be pig stomach—the stomach lining was weird looking and had very little taste. We couldn’t eat much of our meal.
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| This had to be our worst breakfast ever--pig stomach (simply called "carne") in vegetable broth. |
By the time we got back to our hotel it was nearly 10 AM and time to leave for Bucerias. We left our hotel in Tonala at 10:30 AM. (Our cats decided to hide under the bed just for fun!)
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| The agave fields are the color of the sea in the Caribbean. |
Today’s road trip involved a descent of 5,000 feet, most of it during the last two hours of our trip. Route 200 was a simple two-lane road that wound it’s way down the mountain range.
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We got into our new housing in Bucerias at 4:15 PM, about an hour later than anticipated. Today’s 4-1/2-hour trip took the best part of 5-3/4 hours, 28% longer than our cellphone’s GPS predicted. Our AirBnB host (her brother owns the unit above his residence--our apartment) greeted us and helped us get settled—she even bought a bottle of red wine for us!
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We went out for dinner after we got somewhat settled. The restaurant’s name was Encore—it was about a block off the beach. The food and service was great but it was more expensive than what we were accustomed to in Mexico—but $50 USD for both of us wasn’t bad though considering the quality of our meals and the fact that we had mixed drinks and a shared dessert.
Wednesday, February 2
Groundhog Day
We woke up at 8 AM, the first time in our new rental. The sounds of bouncing tennis balls (of all things) echoed through our apartment. A barking dog outside joined the methodical bouncing of the tennis balls. This area was clearly a different Mexico that what we had experienced up until now.
Dew was on our car and the big leaves of the nearby trees in the morning, a sure sign of the higher humidity and the coolness of the early morning. A nice cool ocean breeze made its way through our apartment’s opening windows, causing the fonds on the huge palm tree in front of our apartment to lightly sway. Even though our apartment was six blocks from the ocean, we could hear the ocean above the din of the traffic on the highway.
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I noticed the brightly colored interior walls for the first time in the morning—one orange wall in our bedroom, a blue wall in the dining/living room, and a pink accent wall in the spare bedroom. Sunshine was abundant in this upstairs apartment—something we had sorely missed in our San Miguel apartment.
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| Our kitchen in our Bucerias apartment was full of natural sunlight. |
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| We sat inside Famar Restaurant before they opened and had a drink. |
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