Small Adventure Turns Big...

This weekend, while many other staff members have travelled south to Playa del Carmen, I decided I wanted to stay put in Monterrey. I'll be heading to Austin in two weeks for a half marathon and wanted to be sure I could get my last long run in and spend some time relaxing around the house.

Abby and I decided that we would take a day trip to the nearby city of Saltillo. Saltillo is the capital of Coahuila, the next state over. The drive is not far - it should take less than an hour. We set out early on Saturday morning and unfortunately were driving in an incredibly thick fog. Visibility was horrible. We could barely see the car in front of us.


Despite this. the drive didn't take much more than an hour and 15 minutes, and we made it to the Museo del Desierto (Desert Museum) just as it opened.

This is a pretty neat museum - with dinosaur fossils and all sorts of information about the vegetation and animals of the desert region. It was a challenge though - as all the information was in spanish. I managed to understand a surprising amount. I'll have to tell the kids in my class to visit this museum. We've been studying dinosaurs for the past month in second grade and most of them are pretty much obsessed. I took some pictures that I'll share with them.



After the museum, we parked downtown and went to the market. Saltillo is known for its "sarapes". These are basically the Mexican blankets that a lot of people think of as being a typical souvenir of Mexico. I bought myself a brightly colored striped one that I'll leave out in our living room as a little bit of warmth and a lot of color.

We ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant and I was impressed with how adventurous we were. I had a chicken soup (caldo de pollo, I think) and then there was pollo en una salsa de queso con arroz (chicken in a cheese sauce with rice). On the side there was avocado, and some lettuce and tomato. Though I ate everything else, I didn't trust the uncooked veggies, so I skipped out on my greens.

Shortly after, Abby and I decided we'd seen enough of Saltillo and would head back to Monterrey. It was only 2:30, so I was anticipating we would be back by 4:00 which still left quite a bit of the day in Monterrey. After maneuvering some one way streets, we eventually got to the highway and headed towards Monterrey.

Around 3:00 traffic slowed right down. In fact, we were essentially stopped. In one hour, we moved maybe 50 feet. People were getting out of their cars and trucks to try and figure out what was going on. We were at a junction on the highway and we could see that the lane from the other highway that joined ours was backed up for as far as we could see. I got out of the car and in broken spanish asked a man what was going on. He told me that a truck had fallen over and some pipe had broken and there was liquid all over the road. I asked how long he thought it would be until we moved, and he guessed 3 hours. Abby and I had already looked at the map to see if there were any sideroads we could take to get out of here, but there weren't any in the nearby area. I asked the man if he knew any other way to get to Monterrey. He said we could follow him to Monclava. A few others cars were going to do this, so I got back in the car with Abby and off we went.

Now, Monclava was 170km from where we were. It was also directly north and we needed to travel only 56km more to Monterrey (which was west). We decided we'd rather be moving than sitting on the highway for who knows how long, so we headed to Monclava. At Monclava there is a second highway that takes you south-west to Monterrey - an additional 170km. We ended up getting back to Monterrey around 8pm, exhausted, slightly frustrated and ready to be home. We convinced ourselves that we had chosen the better option, saying that we were sure those people were still stuck on the highway.

This morning I checked the news to find out what had happened. Well, it turns out we did make the better choice, even if we ended up driving 340km instead of 56. The crash had happened just before 3:00pm. The highway didn't get cleared until at least 11pm, though some reports were saying it took 15 hours to restore the highway to normal use. Yikes.

Well, at least we got to see a little more of Mexico, treat ourselves to an icecream sandwich at the Oxxo (like a 7-11) in Monclava, and get home only 12 hours after we'd left that morning.