We had the luxury of not being able to check in to our hotel at our destination until three, so we hung out until ten. The breakfast buffet was excellent and they had professional coed wrestling playing on TV. I feasted on both with the intention of skipping lunch to gorge at dinnertime.
Apparently I hadn't entered Saltillo when I pulled into the Sheraton. As we departed I was whisked through a maze of over and underpasses. I had my first close call of a missed turn since entering Mexico and ran over a couple of round 'sapos' as they're called in El Salvador, big metal protrusions designed to discourage trespassing (in this case, a last-second merge in either direction).
Opie didn't groan in protest so we were all good.
I then spotted my first incognito 'tope' or speed bump of the trip about fifty feet before impact. That was a nasty couple of bumps but nevertheless, Opie persisted. Luckily, I was out of metropolitan Saltillo and I got on the 57/57D, which alternated between toll and libre (free). I went through quite a few elevation changes and my ears popped more than once.
All was well for four hours until we started entering the outskirts of San Luis PotosÃ. The lane count went up by half while traffic quadrupled. I then hit a succession of double topes/single tope every hundred meters or so. This was really annoying, as the first set wasn't marked which sapped my and Opie's mojo. I gauged the Opie's tail-end sway after every bump and tried to gauge as to whether his posterior was drooping more than before and convinced it had.
We got into SLP proper and the city, as much of it as I could see, was beautiful. I stole glances at my surroundings while scanning the lanes in front of me for cars and my lane itself for progress-robbing potholes.
I pulled into the hotel I'd reserved for the evening and walked in with the dog. Opie was in the sun and I didn't want Chucho to fry in the car. The lady had a sourpuss on when I walked up. I told her about my reservation and gave her my last name. She dutifully looked me up and said they had 'normas' regarding pets. I said 'normas?' (a word seldom used in Spanish, hence my question). She nodded and said they had to be under fifteen kilos which Chucho was over by easily five kilos. She kept going down the list and I stopped her and said if he didn't satisfy the first rule, we don't need to go through the rest of them (in as nice a way as possible). She agreed and was helpful in pointing me in the general direction of my second choice in hotels.
I drove another ten or so kilometers(which I'll be able to subtract from tomorrow's total) and pulled in and was greeted by a parking lot one-third populated by Federales trucks, so hopefully Opie will sleep safely...
Miles Driven: 285
Hours Traveled: ~5
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