Villahermosa to Cholula

If I was going to guess at a day where things would go wrong, this is always it. To start with, the very expensive toll road between Villahermosa and the turn to Veracruz is never great. We left our campsite at 9:25am. All went fine until just before noon when we hit some rough road. First the truck started making some load noise on the passenger side. We knew right away that is was a pipe connecting to the manifold which we had just had fixed. It wasn’t too bad, so we continued on. Just after noon we hit a very rough stretch of road and suddenly BANG! The truck started to roar. We quickly pulled to the side of the road to find a break in the exhaust pipe leading to the muffler on the other side of the truck. Nothing was hanging down so we continued on to the next Pemex where Rob crawled under the truck and wired the broken pipe up to be safe. We were heading for Puebla, where they make auto parts for the entire country, our best bet was to continue on and get the problem fixed there. The truck was so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves speak and we had 5 hours of travel to go.

We had only lost about 25 minutes so we were still in good shape to make it to Puebla before nightfall until we hit construction.  We waited in a 2 km line of traffic not knowing how long this would take and how far it would put us behind. Last November we hit two of these delays, the first was 4 hours and the second was 3 hours. These delays made us miss our target campground forcing us to park at Pemex for two additional nights. This delay turned out to be only 40 minutes.

In the end we made it, half deaf, to our campsite by 6:50PM. With only two stops for gas we covered 646km (401 Miles) in 9.5 hours. Also in this time we went from 37C (99F) to 13C (55F) and from -6 meters (-20 feet) in altitude to 2616 meters (8583 feet). A crazy day overall.

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