After such a fun week in Sayulita with the Hauders and McBrides (we’ll do a post on that when we can do it justice) we hit the road north. I don’t think any of us are ready to leave Mexico but here we go. We left for Mazatlan at 10:00 and it was supposed to be a 6 hr drive but ended up being more like 8 with a few bumps along the way. Forty-five minutes into our drive poor Miles was throwing up. Fifteen minutes later Dave got pulled over for speeding outside of San Blas.

Aye yi yi. We had heard a lot about cops taking bribes and weren’t sure if this is what was going to happen. The guy made Dave get out of the van and told him to blow I his face. Gross! He then came up to my window and pointed to Dave’s water bottle and asked if it was beer. He was pretty belligerent. Of course Dave had not been drinking. In he end, he kept Dave’s license (Es mio!) and told us to drive into San Blas and pay the ticket and then comeback to get his license. Dave got his number in case no one was there, it being Saturday after all.

There was no fine listed on the ticket but the guy said it would be $2500 pesos. Ouch. $140. Payable in cash. We had $2400 in bills and scraped up the last $100 in coins. Of course no one was there at the office so Dave called the cop. He ended up coming to us 15 min. later and we gave him the money. No receipt or anything but Dave got his license back. The whole thing was weird and unnerving.

As we went on our way we realized we then had no dinero to pay for the toll highway which meant we had to take the free road until we could find an ATM. Turns out we were hundreds of kilometers from any ATM. So we slowly wound our way up the coast with the semi drivers and farmers who don’t like to pay the tolls.

A couple hours later we found an ATM and jumped on the toll road. In the meantime, I was trying to book us a hotel in Mazatlan. Turns out it is a 4-day weekend here celebrating Benito Juarez and his work on social reforms. Every hotel was booked! We finally got the seemingly last room at a slightly run down beach resort. No complaining here. We were stoked! We got dinner and were all in bed by 8:00. After a fun-filled week and long drive we were pooped.

We are soon headed to the ferry office to see if we can get on the ferry tonight.  Crossing our fingers! We really want to drive up Baja but if we don’t get on tonight we may drive up the mainland. Stay tuned…