Good bad luck on the road

Yesterday we left San Carlos, heading south down the coast. From our guidebook we'd picked out a nice campground as our destination: Mr. Moro RV park at a tiny beach town called Las Glorias. It would be about an hour off the highway, but we had come this way specially for beach time, so that was okay.

As we drove uphill out of Guaymas in the morning, Kelly noticed that when he accelerated, the engine revved a little but there was no corresponding acceleration of the vehicle. This told him the clutch was misbehaving but since it was the first time it had happened, he figured he'd have time to work on it before it would act up seriously. He didn't even mention it to me.

That was probably just as well. I was feeling delicate from a cold, and was having trouble looking out at mile after mile of trash -- mostly plastic -- along the road. The occasional skinny dog rummaging through trash close to the highway didn't help my mood either, though at least I didn't see any dog corpses by the road this time.

The highway went through the city of Ciudad Obregon, and at the stoplights there were hordes of raggedly dressed boys and young men, mostly wanting to wash windshields but also selling various items. We fended them all off, but when we stopped for gas and to have brunch in the RV, one plaintive boy watched us. I waved him off, but he opened his mouth in an obvious symbol for hunger. I took him out some extra tortillas, and when he saw me coming he hid between a couple of soft drink dispensers, presumably so I couldn't hit him. He accepted the tortillas politely and mostly left us alone after that, but the whole thing bothered me. I'm never comfortable in such encounters, no matter how they play out.

The afternoon wore on as we headed south. Traffic was pretty heavy, and much of it was SUVs and other vehicles with California plates -- Mexicans and Mexican-Americans returning to their families for the holidays. At one time we saw five California vehicles in a row.

We also noticed a Monsanto plant, and that didn't do anything for my mood. We were in a fertile agricultural area now, and no doubt most if not all of the verdant crops were genetically modified. This is not a good thing for a number of reasons.

When it was finally time to pull off the highway and take quiet back roads to our campground destination, we were both relieved. I was glad to get out of the wild energy flow... in fact, I fervently wished we didn't have so far still to go to Mazatlan, Guadalajara, and Bernal. Kelly had noticed a few more incidents with the clutch but he had come to the conclusion that we could probably get all the way back to our town of Bernal in a week or two, before needing to work on the clutch. Kelly's done a lot of work on our vehicles over the years, and his judgments are good.

But it was not to be. For the last 20 kilometers of back roads, the vehicle was not running at all well. When we turned onto the street where the campground was supposed to be, we stalled. Kelly got us going again, and we both watched eagerly for the campground entrance as the motorhome crawled along with the engine racing. There was the entrance, here the dirt road out to the beach, here a spot with water and electricity. We pulled in and stopped.

Whew! We made it... to paradise in the form of a bright yellow motel building flanked by campsites, beside a long beach. Palm trees, a pool, a palapa restaurant, gentle breezes, you get the picture.

We've long said that we have good bad luck. That is, we have bad luck from time to time, but it tends to have silver linings. So now we are stuck here in this charming place. What a problem!

We went for a long walk in a glorious sunset. Larry liked the wide beach and romped like a puppy. Kelly and I were both immensely grateful that we'd gotten here.

And what about the clutch? We'll have to see. Kelly has read his manual and looked things over, and his conclusion is that we need a new clutch. The people in the office say that there are quite a few mechanics at the nearby ranches, and they will think who is best. Perhaps tomorrow someone will come by here.

In the meantime, Kelly has gotten our internet dish set up, we've enjoyed a sunrise even more glorious than the sunset, we've chatted with some of our fellow campers, and life is good.

They say some people stay here for months.