Second Travel Day we made it to the Emerald Coast

On Friday night after our 10 hour drive from Xpu-Ha, we got gas and parked with the big trucks at the Pemex Gas Station in Chiapas at the highway that goes to Palenque at about 4 PM and in rolled our friends from Xpu-Ha, Rob & Shirley.  They are going to travel to the Emerald Coast on Saturday and are planning the same route but we left while they fueled up in the morning. They caught us when we were filling up at the MX145 Cuota heading to Vera Cruz. We then stayed together all the way to camp.

The roads have been getting better each time I go this way. MX186 in Chiapas has been terrible but it is newly paved and it even had reflectors on the lane markers. This helped out since we left at 5:50 AM and it was cloudy, raining lightly and very dark until we got to Villahermosa. Since it was Saturday the traffic there was very light and fast. The rest of the Cuotas all the way to Acayucan were as good as they were on the way down. We had heard that MX145 after Acayucan was terrible but they have fixed much of the North bound side, not terrific since it is a toll road but not bad.

The one bad section is MX180 south of Veracruz. They are building new bridges and it will eventually have overpasses & interchanges with several of the major roads that it crosses. So now, it’s worse than usual with huge holes and even more helpers flagging you though the intersections. Two years ago they repaved MX180 north of Veracruz all the way to Nautla. It’s still a very narrow, winding road with lots of traffic but fortunately the pavement is still good and it had less than 1/3 the traffic that was traveling South bound. As a result today’s drive was about 9 3/4 hours instead of the 10 1/2 hours that I had planned. We camped at Neptuno Campground  about 3 mi north of Casitas.

We had 2 or 3 Federal Police blockades with portable radar units that we went through but no inspection stops or any military stops.

The rain stopped in the morning and the temperature was in the low 60’s. In Veracruz the sun came out and it was 79oF when we got to camp. We had a small cocktail hour before our dinners. Tomorrow we may still be traveling together and hope to make it through Tampico and up to Soto de Marina. We hope we don’t have trouble with the crooked police like Gerry & Brenda did yesterday. Read Brenda’s blog, she did good avoiding paying a bribe.

See Day 3 of our Trip Plans.