La Pesca & The Emerald Coast

Mexico La Pesca & Emerald Coast

Left “Gentle Breeze’s RV Park” about 8:30AM, and going through the Pharr Crossing was a breeze, if you will pardon the pun. Having pre-registered both vehicles on the internet, in the Banjercito Web Site, it took about about 10 minutes, with no lineups.

We got onto Hwy 2W, about 2Kms after the border, in about 7kms we looked for Hwy 97S. What “Church & Church” in their book “Mexican Camping” (here after will be referred to as the “Book”) don’t say, is there is no intersection at this point, you have to go about 200 Meters past, get in the left lane so you can take a “Retorno”, then get in the right lane on the frontage road in heavy traffic, so you can make the turn south at the point where the intersection for a major highway, should have been. “Only in Mexico”. We did all the right things, and got on 97S.

97S connects with 101/180 south after about 100kms, then 180 branches off , we will take this Hwy all the way to Cancun. Just after we made the turn we ran into about 23kms of new road construction, it seemed like about 50kms, talk about rough. A lot of it was 20kms per hour, and my nice new wash job on the vehicles was ruined, by the dust & mud.

We got to La Pesca on the Gulf of Mexico, about 3:30PM, got a site at La Gaviota Campground, nice place. Took “Suzie” (our Suzuki Samari tow vehicle) and looked around, it is definitely a Mexican Tourist area, nice beach, with at least a couple of hundred “Palapa’s” for rent on the public beach. The beach has fine clean sand, with millions of sea shells.

The next day was a short day, 4 hours, as we stopped just north of Tampico, at a hotel that allow RV’s to park in their parking area, we did this because The “Book” did not show any RV Parks until you got to the Emerald Coast, about 7-8 hours away.

The next leg of our trip was a tough trip, 8 hours to go 200 miles. The roads on the east coast of Mexico are not anywhere near the caliber of the ones we have experienced on the west coast. Hwy 180, is the toughest stretch of paved road I have ever faced. The roads were never built right, not ditched or compacted properly. Resulting in a very uneven surface, at a numerous spots you had to come to a complete stop, as I am sure you could lose your camper with heaves up to 3 feet deep. Brand new pavement with pot holes a foot deep, and hundreds of speed bumps.
It a good thing we were driving a “Dodge”. I should get some comments on that statement.

I would strongly discourage anyone from taking Hwy 180 south, and we still have about 1000 miles to go. But the new “Guia Rojo” map book, shows that there are more Toll Roads ahead, this should help. The way Lil has it figured out, if we take the tool roads, we can save 2 days driving on our way to Cancun.


The road was especially hard on Lil, as she has arthritis in her back, and the side to side swaying really aggravates this condition, and it was a tough day for me too. So we are taking a one day break at the Emerald Coast, this is a really nice area, and the Quinta Alicia RV Park is great.
If we could have stuck to our original schedule, we would have stayed here a few days. It was 83F when we got here, but it rained a little last night, cloudy this morning, with a temp of 72F.

Hopefully I can Post this and some Photos today, at an Italian Coffee House down the road.

Herb & Lil