Mexico road trip

Ever since my visit to El Paso in 2006, I've contemplated crossing the border to Mexico. I've been to the border in San Diego, Durango as well without crossing. For several reasons. This year, I allied myself with three SINTEF colleagues to take a road trip to Ensenada. This time I succeed in visiting Mexico for the first time. It turned out to be a fantastic but eventful roadtrip.

Preparations for the trip started with the rental car booking. With Avis in Norway, my thorough travel agent double checked that the car was OK to enter Mexico. No VISA required, and border crossing times at Tihuana and Tecate was taken into consideration when planning.  Laguna Hanson in Parque Nacional de Constitucion 1857 was the only National Park within range; due to geocaching I had already marked this spot for my 2011 trip to San Diego. My colleagues also wanted to take a hike there so we decided on the following route estimated to be less than 8 hours of driving:

The plan was to arrive in Los Angeles at 16:00 and be in San Diego well before bedtime the day before the trip to Mexico. With heavy snowfall at OSL, we lost our CPH - LAX flight and had to go through Chicago. We arrived at midnight at LAX. AVIS has a luxurious Ford Expedition ready for us. Unfortunately, the USD 44 extra insurance for entering Mexico could not be added at LAX. This meant an extra trip to San Diego Airport in the morning. We drove to San Diego and managed to get to bed by 04:00.

The SINTEF crew met at 08:00 in the morning and drove to the San Diego airport. Here we ran into trouble again as the luxurious Ford was not allowed for export into Mexico. We were offered a not so luxurious Toyota 4Runner and was happy just to be happy to be on our way after paying the required USD 44. We crossed the border at Tecate shortly after, and not as expected we showed no papers for the car nor passports. We were finally in Mexico!

A clockwise direction of the trip was decided in order to drive the coast back at sunset. We headed east towards Mexicali. Road 2D turned out to be a toll road; we did not have pesos but USD was  accepted. We stopped in La Rumorosa for lunch and supplies. Credit cards were accepted but we figured cash would be good to have before going into less urban areas.  We managed to find an ATM, but none of us were able to get any cash.

La Rumorosa lunch. 4Runner on the left.

 

The road to the national park turned out to be a disaster. The dirt road were full of holes. We tried for a km or two with the fairly capable 4Runner before realising that the 64 km to the Laguna Hanson would take forever. So we had to  skip the national park double track back to the starting point in Tecate. Luckily, we could drive HW3 south/southwest down to Ensenada. This turned out to be a very nice drive through the wine district. Here we could see wine farms with small barrel-styled cabins in the hillsides. Very scenic.

Arriving in Ensenada, were fascinated by the enormous flag. The enormous flagpole is 50 meters tall and the flag itself 14.3 by 25 meters.

Ensenada flag.

The time was already past 15:00 and my driving duties were done for the day. From looking at Untappd we found an excellent pub nearby and all minus the driver could enjoy several beers at the Fauna tasting room. Great experience!

Fauna Tap Room.

Ensenada is a large tourist destination with a lot of cruice ships visiting. Dining options were many but we wanted to try to find a Mexican alternative. That we did. Food was served in a way I've not seen before, but it was very good. The very good green vegetable to the left of the meat was later identifies as Nopal. It was very good and something I've tried to find in Norway.

Mexican dinner.

After dinner it was time to start the return trip to San Diego. It was already starting to get dark and we expected Tijuana border crossing to be slow on a Saturday night. The plan was to take HW 201 back to Tecate and and cross before it closed at 22:00.

The plan was sound, had it not been for a police control on HW 201 that set up back one hour.  The police examined both car and passengers (no undressing) thorougly before we were allowed to drive on.  We arrived in Tecate before 21:00 only to find a long line. When the border closed at 22:00 we were simply directed towards Tijuana.

After about an hour of driving we hit Tijuana only to find an endless line of cars. The line was hardly not moving so it gave me time to do some geocaching in the area. The time it took us to cross was about four hours, slighlty longer than the estimated time for crossing.

San Ysidro crossing on a Saturday night.

The four hour wait in the car with four tired, and jet-lagged persons were quite interesting. I cannot help but to think back to Big Brother on TV in the 90ties. Anyways, we made it through and in retrospective it was a great trip we want to do again, but with more time in Mexico to visit the national park and more restaurant and pubs.

GPS tracklog of the 528 km driven.