We hung out in Queretaro a couple of days longer than we would have expected. The city is not great, but it’s not half-bad either. The campground was really nothing more than a parking space at the Hotel Flamingo with our door opening up on the one stretch of lawn right next to the swimming pool. Since we were staying a few days—and since they didn’t have sewer hook-ups—we had to keep a bucket under the bus to catch the gray water that we’d then dump in the flower garden. The whole scene was a little awkward, which I suspect is how they keep RVers from making themselves too comfortable. Anyway, after a nice stay we packed up our bucket and moved on.

This huge park nearby was putting the finishing touches on a huge new playground—and was closed off—meaning our kids had to find their own fun.

Just up the road from Queretaro is Bernal, known for little more than having the third largest monolith in the world. Yep, one big rock.

Give and you shall receive.

One thing about the kids growing up that Ali won’t miss is lugging an oversized bag full of cars, snacks, water, and wipes everywhere she goes.

Everything that Lowe sees is viewed as a potential road for his cars. Everything.

Gorditas—chicken or cactus they’re both delicious. That huge bowl of exquisitely spiced salsa required two beers to cool off.

Cheap entertainment for the kids. These things are in front of just about every shop, and none of them appears to have been manufactured in the last thirty years.

We thought we were going to stay in another nearby town for the night. It’s a town known for its abundance of water parks, most of which have some sort of accommodations for RVs. Problem is, we were there on a Wednesday and every single park was closed—open only on the weekends. One of the security guards offered to let us stay in the parking lot, and with well over a hundred miles to go to our next destination, we gladly accepted.

Teotihuacan is where we’re at right now. Just outside Mexico City is this neat little RV park located in a front yard right in town. The draw card here is the Teotihuacan ruins, as well as having a place to hunker down for a couple of days to wait out election day.

The past week or so the mosquitos have been driving us nuts. We finally bought some bug screen and set about sealing off three of the large vents on the side of the bus—a pretty obvious and easy place for bugs to make their way inside.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve also resealed a bunch of different things around the bus with butyl tape. I’ve been surprised to find that everything I’ve pulled off the bus (the railings on the roof, a couple of mounting plates, and these vents) have been sealed up with butyl tape, which after thirty, forty, fifty years, still seems to be doing its job. The reason I even took them off in the first place is that we had a leak inside—a leak that I tracked down to two holes from the luggage carrier that I ripped off when we bought the bus. Obviously, I am the one who didn’t seal them properly the first time, which I like to blame on the weather at the time.

Around Teotihuacan, dogs are everywhere.

Today Ali and Lowe were playing when she made a pretend phone call to him. Lowe answered as he always does, “What is it?” He says this in a jolly, not a grumpy, voice.

Ali laughed and said, “You’re not supposed to answer the phone like that.”

Lowe looked at her and asked simply, “What?”

At nearly four years he still doesn’t know how to answer a phone. I accept that as a parenting win. I honestly doubt that he has ever watched either of us answer a real phone. Thinking back on it now I can’t even think of when the last time that I might have answered a phone would have been.