Friends in high places

It seems like we spent the last week meeting old friends and making new ones.

One thing about sleeping in your vehicle while traveling is that you end up doing the RV park/campground trail. We love to park for the night in some street or in front of a town square, but usually, after a few days of this, we miss having showers, wifi, and space for Milo to run around. The problem with the RV park trail is that it’s easy to isolate yourself from the places you’re visiting. This is why I–perhaps stupidly–have refused to own a copy of that Church&Church Mexican Camping book. We both like to think that we like to improvise, arrive a couple of hours before sunset to a town and figure out where to stay. Our worst case scenario is always the last gas station we see before entering town. We haven’t had to camp at a gas station yet.

The upside of the campground thing is that you run into cool people. After the six days we spent in Chetumal (and we had our share of cool people there) we drove back to Chiapas, to San Cristóbal. With the ~2000m climb we left the heat of Quintana Roo behind, in exchange for the cool (cold!) mountain weather. We arrived after dark, went shopping for groceries, and headed to the campground. It was a surprise to see Kellee, Jamie and their dog Reina there, our friends who we met in Baja in October. We had had dinner with them near Cancun a few days earlier, and thought they were on their way to Belize.

After we came back from Chiapa de Corzo, we made some new friends. Leandro and Andrea are driving a sweet VW LT camper around North and Central America for a year.  One night we piled seven people in the Westy and drove to a pozole place in town.

After the Tranquilos left, we became friends with Diana and Steven, who have been in Mexico from Holland for a long time, and are now driving a very nice 72 Westy to South America. Steven organized a barbecue, for which he and I set off to buy some meat. Even though we got too much (about 1.5 hamburgers and 1 steak per person!) we somehow consumed it all that night. We also met Arjen and Mandy. He has a camo painted ex-army T3 back in Holland, so the bbq that night was a bit like a Volkswagen club meetup.

Before leaving on this trip I think we were afraid that we wouldn’t have much of a social life for a year. We really weren’t expecting that we’d be running into friends every now and then as it is happening now!