Mazatlan to Los Mochis, our 51st Anniversary and a crappy end to the day.

Friday morning at 9am and it's time to say good-bye to Stumpy and his friend.  These two iguanas have been eating all my leftover fruit cores and peelings as well as leftover lettuce all winter.  They don't like carrots!  I call him Stumpy because... well....half his tail is missing!  Not much for iguanas to eat in the park now that all the bush has been cleared but it seems they get along quite well on their own so my food was just a bonus.

Heading forward out of the park.

Looking back and you can see all the houses behind the wall.

Bye-bye Hal and Helene and the bus.

Passing the front of the big development next door and you can see they are putting in a big concrete road.  The part nearest the road will all be commercial development while the back will hold the houses and condos.

Heading onto 15D or the maxipista towards Culiacan.

Doesn't look too bad at all.

As we get farther north near La Cruz de elote you can see elote...or corn.

Spring has sprung and the pink trees are blooming.

These cattle are eating tomatoes....wonder how the meat tastes.  Does it taste like you already have the tomato sauce on it?

Now for the yellow trees....don't know what they are either.  That's the army going by.

Pretty as we get nearer to Culiacan and we must say that they toll road between Mazatlan and Culiacan is quite decent.  We even drove in the slow lane!

Now that is one pretty tree!

So how do you think the trees are getting trimmed...by the tallest trucks...right.

We pay over 300 pesos at each end of the Mazatlan to Culiacan stretch.  They ding us for 5 axles because the RV has a triple.  More than a motor home with a towed vehicle.

Tomatoes.

Not sure what that is but it's quite gold in color.

Oh look another toll on the Culiacan bypass and then at the other end of the bypass.

....and now the road turns to "shit."  Like to be more polite but that's what it is.

Smashing and bashing our way along.

Maybe mustard seed?

Green, green and more green.

Need a tractor these are made in India.

Coming into Guasave and the road from Culiacan has just been awful.  Whoever looks after this stretch of road should be embarrassed!

Sharing the road.

Left for our retourno back to what used to be Pemex 4925 and is now a Smart Gas.

Here we are.

Eric was backing up at the end of the lot and trying to straighten out the axles but how can you straighten that out.  Look a little odd that the back passenger tire is about a foot behind the middle axle?  We arrived at 3:30 pm and it took us six hours of driving as slow and careful as we could be and this is what we get for it.

This brand new tire is completely ruined!

Turns out that the center bolt in the brand new five leaf spring that we had made in Mazatlan is broken and all the leafs and U bolts have slid to the rear taking the axle with it.

The tire was so far back that it was rubbing on the back stairs.  No smoke and nothing odd in the handling and everything was fine when we stopped for lunch.  So once again the bad roads have sabotaged us.  Very tiresome and becoming time to put an end to all of this.

That is the bolt that was broken in the middle of the spring.  Defective?  When Eric changed the spring everything was torqued tight and nothing should have been able to move.  Apparently the only thing that is supposed to allow a center bolt in a spring to break is loose U bolts.  Since Eric could hardly undo the bolts holding the U bolts that was not it.  Shall we blame the Mexican roads....you bet!

All the leafs have slid to one side so now he will have to replace the new spring with the used four leaf one that he took out.  Sigh!

It was hot and Eric was in his coveralls jacking up the trailer and undoing bolts and replacing springs.  I stood by to hand him whatever he needed.  It's a good thing he is in good shape for a 72 year old man!  However he is injured.  As I haven't been keeping the blog up I didn't mention that on Thursday night he had a big fall.  It was dark when he went to close the outside back door on the RV and when he stepped out it was into... thin air!  He'd been loading the RV earlier in the day and had left the stairs up so he fell about 3 feet.  I was already in bed with my earplugs in and thought he was just crashing around.  I found him sitting in the garage in a bit of shock.  He'd managed to pull the stairs down and crawl back inside.  He'd scraped up his arm, bruised his back and hit his head.  I laid him down until he felt able to get up and then bandaged his arm and gave him some advil before he went to bed.  He was very lucky not to have broken a bone or even his neck.  So....long story short he is still pretty sore especially his ribs and now this.

Almost two hours later and he is ready to put on one of our new spares.   Good thing we have two!

He had to loosen the U bolts on the drivers side so he could get the passenger side undone.  Now he is tightening up those.

So all in all it was another typical RV day for the Tycho's in Mexico.  Would any of this happen on better roads....probably not.

Right behind us they were loading potatoes onto a conveyor belt to load them into a truck.  A bit odd since they are already in bags.

Lots more to load.

Many hands make light work....hah ....that's heavy work and I'll bet they only get the minimum wage which was raised to $102.68 pesos a day in 2019 (less than $10.00 Canadian)  This was a 16.21% raise for 2019 so ....count your lucky stars as they pay the same prices for fuel and food that we do.

It was now time for beer and something to eat.  We'd been going to go over to the Elba Restaurant for dinner but I decided Eric didn't need to go anywhere so I defrosted some home made lasagna.

Happy Anniversary....bah humbug!