Final night in Mexico, for now

We are still on the beach at Playas Del Sol. We've had a relaxing five days here, and tomorrow we will pull up stakes and head for San Luis del Rio Colorado and the US border.

The weather has been quite pleasant, if a bit windy at times, and we have been grilling every night and eating in. We had to make two market runs -- one for milk and eggs, as we had run out of breakfast fixin's, and this morning for some fresh veggies, which we had also exhausted, to go with tonight's steak. We never made it back to Juanito's to use our remaining Margarita coupons.

We did get out for breakfast yesterday, running up to Jimmy's Beach Bar and Grill at Playa de Oro. I have to say that I found Jimmy's and the adjoining pool facilities there to be a nicer environment than the facilities up at El Dorado -- if we ever do end up looking at property here, Playa de Oro would be ahead of El Dorado on my list.

We had a mostly quiet and relaxing stay here. Friday night, a couple of guys in a pickup truck parked right in the middle of the vado next to us, and blasted music at high volume until 6am. They then proceeded to sleep the whole day on the beach in the shade of their truck. We very nearly started the engine at 3am to drive down right next to them and smoke them out with our exhaust while frying their retinas with the HID flood lights. But it's Mexico, and there are "no bad days."

We were quite relieved, though, to see them pack up late yesterday afternoon and clear out. In fact, we had thought about leaving today, but we decided to stay an extra night just because we have the whole beach to ourselves again (there was another rig here over the weekend, along with a group of guys in a tent, in addition to the noisy Mexicanos) and we wanted our memories of the place to be more on the peaceful side.

For the last few days, we've been mostly just taking it easy around the house, with the gulf as a backdrop. I did get a few projects done, including installing some shelves in the under-sink cabinet, and putting extra lights on my scooter. Louise, on the other hand, has done an incredible amount of work putting together the "tour of Odyssey" videos, which came out very nicely, I think. You'll have to let us know what you think once she has them all posted (we have to spread out the uploads due to thresholds imposed by our satellite service).

Tomorrow morning we will load up the scooters and head out, stopping at the Pemex just north of here to top up with $2.07 diesel before heading to the border. We have a choice of two routes from here to San Luis -- corresponding to the number of bridges that cross the Colorado. I'm leaning toward the more obscure southern route, through Durango, but if we get short on time we will blast up 5 to the new cuota cut-off for 2, which will take us due east to San Luis. With any luck, we will cross the border in time to get our mail before the end of the day, which should be waiting for us at the Somerton post office.