Northward bound via PV

Nuevo Vallarta, Nayarit, Mexico

Those regular and exceptionally astute readers will notice that it does not say Mazatlan above.

For the last week in Mazatlan we have been experiencing some foggy mornings, sometimes persisting until noon. Everyone assures us that this is very unusual for this area and especially for this time of year - probably global warming in action (or fallout from the disaster in Japan). Regardless of why, it does make for some cooler days. Not to worry though, it is still shorts and tee-shirts, just may need a cozy in the early morning and after dark in the evening - not that hard to take. The girls have been taking this opportunity to go on shopping expeditions, sometimes going all the way downtown to the main market. Since the costs are starting to mount up, it is clearly time for us to be moving on.

We have a flight booked back to Edmonton on Thursday from Puerto Vallarta (plans made when we actually thought we might sail further south than Mazatlan this season). Rather than change the booking, we decided to make a sort of mini-break holiday out of it by taking a bus to PV and spending a few days at an upscale resort before flying home to the frozen north. We have a flight back to Mazatlan on April 30th, so we will be gone from Maz for a total of about 3 weeks. This meant that a lot of the people we have been hanging around with are not going to be there when we get back, either flying home for the summer or heading for the Sea of Cortez. Chances are we might not run into them again, at least not for a while.

This called for one last farewell dinner out, ending up on David and Gitte's gorgeous Norseman 447, which the rest of us had been dying to see. So we said good-bye to some great friends in what is likely to be the first in a series of such touching scenes as we continue this cruising life. In the end, one of the couples had decided at the last minute to accompany us on the bus to PV, getting off a little earlier at La Cruz to visit some other friends for a few days - so we did have their company for another day.

Like the true vagabonds we have become, we walked out of the marina this morning, waited for a local bus to take us to the main bus depot, caught the first-class luxury long-distance bus to PV, followed by a short taxi ride to our current location at Paradise Village in Nuevo Vallarta. This turns the 200 mile journey into an all-day affair. We left the marina at 8:30 AM and arrived at the resort around 6 PM (although it was actually 7 PM since we had slipped into the Central time zone somewhere along the way), In fact it was a very pleasant trip through some parts of Mexico we had not seen before and the price is right - the local bus was 6 pesos each, the luxury bus was 380 pesos each and the taxi to the hotel was 150 pesos. Current exchange rate to Canadian dollar is about 12.2 pesos, so you can figure it out if so inclined.

The view from our balcony at Paradise Village.

Notice that taking the cheapest room they have going, does NOT get you an ocean view. This is not much of a problem for us as we see our share of ocean most of the time.

{GMST}20|41.8|N|105|17.51|W|Nuevo Vallarta, Nayarit, Mexico|Nuevo Vallarta, Nayarit, Mexico{GEND}