Heading North

After visiting Tenacateta and Barra Navidad, we decided to return north and spend a couple of months in the Sea of Cortes before continuing up to Ensenada for the summer. The Mexican mainland has some beautiful cities but few good anchorages where you can swim and snorkel, so it's north we go.

This time when we arrived in Puerto Vallarta we decided to stay closer to town in the Vallarta Marina. We called beforehand and were assured that they would have room for us and when we arrived at 8 AM we tried to call them on the VHF radio with no luck so we just went in and tied up at the first easy spot we could find and walked up to the office. The office staff are not particularly friendly or helpful but we did get a slip and settled in. There were 2 things we needed to do in PV; 1) get mail from the states and 2) renew our Mexican tourist visas which expired in March.

We immediately sent an email to our mail forwarding outfit in Anacorts to send our accumulated mail to the marina office here. Our past experience is that it takes 10-14 days to receive mail in MX so we were optimistic. Next was a trip to the PV immigrations office to try to get our visas renewed or a new visa issued. No deal! We had to leave the country to get a new visa, no exceptions even though we had renewed our visa in Guaymas last summer with no problem. Our only option was to fly to the states and re-enter the country. Some searching on the internet found that the cheapest way to do this was to take a Mexican airline, Volaris, to Tijuana and walk across the boarder. The airfare was half the cost of flying directly into San Diego or any other city in the states. So that's what we did. We flew to TJ, took a taxi to the boarder, walked across and took the trolley to San Diego and checked into a motel in Chula Vista. We spent a couple of days shopping and walking around and then came back into Mexico, got our new 180 day visas and flew back to PV. Not cheap but necessary.

When we returned we were disappointed that our mail had still not arrived. We had hoped to come back, get our mail and leave but now it looked like we would be stuck here until the mail arrived. After another week of waiting we started making plans to leave and have a very nice lady that we met check for our mail and forward it to wherever we are when it came in. Some people are just nice and it's great when you meet them in a time of need.

PV is a great town for cruisers, and others. It has a terrific bus system, more stores than you could hope for and restaurants on every corner. We had a great time here but after a month it's time to move on.

Clouseau RIP -
Our beloved cat and family member Clouseau passed while in PV from aliments brought on from old age. He was a member of our family for 18 years and will be dearly missed.