The “crasy” red van with Ben and Sylvia led the way on our passage to Villa Corona. With the exception of the red lights that I had to run in Aguas Calientes it appeared that we would have an easy trip.

Deep into the city of Guadalajara Ben informed us that the he and Sylvia hadn’t seen the roads we planned to take and that we may need to get creative with our route. Apparently the highways are referred to with names inside the city instead of the numbers you see on maps and elsewhere. Just after Ben’s revelation and independent of our best efforts our group was divided in a complicated multi light and median intersection. Jerry and I were left behind and Paul, Linda, Ben and Sylvia took off on an expressway. As they were driving out of site I was trying to get the rear of my van out of oncoming traffic. After many calls to Jerry I finally realized that his radio was dead and that my horn and hand signals were not helping save my bike from being ripped off of the back of my van. Meanwhile on the radio voices were constantly and simultaneously exclaiming directions, whereabouts, questions and repetitions all thick with static and Canadian accents. It quickly became evident that Jerry and I were on our own and even though we didn’t know our exact destination we were decided to head in the general direction and figure things out as we could. Jerry entered a destination into his GPS and we put ourselves at it’s mercy, roundabouts sudden turns and all.

After a few minutes of aggressively bad driving I again heard the familiar accents on the radio. Since the voices were becoming clearer we kept moving and expected to catch the other half of our group within a few miles. The clarity peaked and then started to decay until the voices were lost and we were again on our own. Knowing that we might be in for a long and wandering drive we stopped to fill our tanks. Jerry then made a very unpredictable and questionably masculine (though smart) move and asked for directions. With our limited Spanish asking directions of the Pemex guy was going a lot like our earlier navigation in Guadalajara until the Pemex attendant pulled out a pen and wrote down directions to the general spot on the map that we were heading for. Miraculously the directions took us back to the road where we had lost the rest of our group and it became clear that we had, in our wanderings, driven right over the top of them as they waited under an overpass for us to drive by.

South of Guadalajara we spotted the welcome sight of one bright red and one green Westfalia and soon after we were all camped out and retelling the day’s adventures on the northwest shore of Lake Chapala.

Jonathan Poole

Villa De Corona, Lake Chapala Mexico

A few random photos from the drive before Guadalajara,

Posted on December 11th, 2007 by Poolio
Filed under: Jonathan Poole