April 23, Veracruz to Villahermosa - 300 Miles

This was the day of the Big Sandstorm!

Before starting out from Veracruz, we rode to the Honda shop where we had gotten help when Alex's alternator went out on his bike, on our 2002 trip.  We hoped to say hello to the manager and three young mechanics who helped us out of trouble then.  Unfortunately, in the last two years many personnel changes had taken place, and none of them worked there anymore.

So off we went.  Traffic in Veracruz was very heavy, but we were soon making some headway.  This was to be a 300 mile day, but with the many, many small villages we rode through on the Libre, we made very poor time.  We left about 9:30 AM, and by noon we had gone 69 miles!  Then we ran into THE SANDSTORM!  It was really bad, and lasted for many miles, including through a town where we had to take a difficult detour.

When we got out of the sandstorm, we ran right into a rainstorm!  At least we got our rain gear on before we actually hit the rain (it had some hail also).  So, the bikes were just splotches of mud by the time we got out of that.

We could see we weren't going to make our target city for the night this way, so after riding through many more small villages and finally reaching the place we could get on the Quota (toll road), we just zoomed ahead for the last 150 miles, paid a tolls of about 80 Pesos ($8 US), and made it to a hotel for the night at about dusk.  The hotel cost was only about $15 for the night for a single, but while the rooms were quite small, they were well enough equipped to have a bathroom and a shower that worked.  The only thing that didn't work was the telephones.  Oh well, another good day anyway.

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