Daily Archives: February 5, 2014

February 5, 2014 Ensenada, Mexico

Well, we arrived in Ensenada!  To give you a little background, we belong to an RV group called Escapees.  They have a subgroup, or chapter, called Mexican Connection 8.  Once a year they get a caravan together and travel down to Mexico to explore, have fun, and do a little charity work.  This group has travelled to Mexico 29 years. This year they decided to go to Ensenada in Baja, California, which is really part of Mexico.

We met up with the Mexican Connection 8 group in San Diego on February 3rd and had 2 days of getting to know each other and some informative meetings on traveling and camping in Mexico.  On February 5th, we were all ready to go!

There are 47 RVs and 90 people in the group this year.  They divided us into groups of eight rigs with each group leaving ten minutes apart, which would prevent us bunching up at the border crossing and all getting to the campground at once.  Each RV was required to have a CB radio to stay in touch, and each group had a leader who had experience traveling in Mexico the last rig was our tailgunner who also had Mexican experience.  Our wagonmaster (trip leader) had made a scouting trip down early to check on the road conditions, the campground, and to let the border crossing know we would be coming through with 47 RVs…just a little courtesy call to let them know to expect us.  The main toll road from Tijuana to Ensenada had been destroyed by an earthquake back in December…it just collapsed into the Pacific Ocean, so the wagonmaster wanted to check out the detour road to be sure it could accommodate RVs.

Our group of eight RVs was the last group to leave San Diego around 8:50 Wednesday morning.  Our wagonmaster had told us that it was possible we could get inspected at the Mexican border, but since they were expecting us and they did not want to back up their border crossing with 47 big RVs, they may or may not inspect us.  We had to all stop and get our FMMs (Visas) stamped at the border and then we were waved through.  Only one RV in our group was stopped for a quick inspection.  Later we found out about a fourth of the 47 RVs were stopped for a quick inspection, not bad.  Because the border crossing knew we were all coming, they provided each of the six groups with a federal police escort through the city of Tijuana, which was very nice except he escorted us through at about 25 mph!  At least we saw a little of Tijuana! 01-P1040005 08-P1040029

The police escort left us at the first toll plaza where we paid to get on the toll road which we would travel on for a short distance before taking the detour due to the road collapse.  The toll road was much like in the United States and we paid 63 pesos which was a little over $5.  We had gone to Costco in San Diego before we left and exchanged some American money for pesos.  We had to go through one more toll plaza and paid another 63 pesos.  The views along the way were beautiful of the Pacific Ocean.  We also noticed what the border fence looked like from the other side!  The smaller brown fence is the Mexican border and the larger white fence is on the American side with a road for the border patrol vehicles. 02-P1040010 03-P1040016 04-P1040017 05-P1040018 10-P1040033 06-P1040021 11-P1040040 12-P1040044 16-P1040057 17-P1040061 19-P1040077

One of the best things about traveling in a caravan like this is the safety of traveling in numbers.  Shortly before we were to get off the toll road and take the narrow, winding, and mountainous detour road, one of our back tire sensors went off warning us of low tire pressure, and the tire next to it was heating up because it was taking more weight due to the low pressure in the other tire.  Bill used his CB radio to tell our group leader we needed to pull over.  Luckily by then we had reached the end of the toll road and there was large enough place for all eight of the RVs in our group to pull safely over.  All the men in our group immediately came over to assist Bill in diagnosing the problem.  The motto is “no one gets left behind”.  If the problem was one in which it would require hours or days to fix, the tailgunner would stay with the stranded RV until the problem was fixed and the others would continue on.  Bill and the others quickly found the problem to be that the tire stem loosened on the rim which caused air to leak slowly.  Before we had hardly gotten out of our RV to check the problem, a Green Angel appeared.  These are trucks provided by the government which patrol the area and come to the assistance of stranded travelers.  Bill had an air compressor so he was able to get air to put in the tire.  The Green Angel insisted on putting the air in the tire for us and helping any way he could.  He then escorted our group the 22 miles on the detour until we were back on the toll road again.  As I said, the detour road was not the best to travel in an RV, but we made it!  The tourism is suffering some from the collapse of the toll road and they are doing everything they can to be helpful and friendly in the Baja region. 14-P1040051 13-P1040048 15-P1040053

When we arrived at our campground, the wagonmaster had arranged for the first RV group to be parkers, so they were waiting to show us to our sites and helped us park in our spots.

To our surprise the campground has free WIFI…not the best, especially at night when everyone is trying to use it, but still much better than we expected since we expected nothing.  The signal is very slow and weak so we were not be able to post any blogs with pictures. until now.  We have 20 amp electrical service so we have to be careful that we don’t turn on too many appliances at once.  The water pressure is very low and we are using the water to shower.  We filled our water tank up before we left San Diego and we are using that for drinking.  The water here is salty and not something you would want to drink. even filtered.

The Estero Beach Hotel and Resort where we are staying is beautiful and our first night here we had a welcome dinner at the hotel restaurant with margaritas and a great mariachi band that entertained us before and during dinner. 24-P1040097 25-P1040101 26-P1040104 27-P1040106

I will stop the blog here and let you know more about Ensenada in another blog post.  We have a bus tour of Ensenada planned and I will tell you about that next time!  Due to extremely slow internet at our campsite we walked up to the hotel office to do this blog.  Hopefully it will go through okay with pictures included.

Adios from Ensenada!