We stayed an extra day in Deming to get everything done. When I got up in the morning it was 38* INSIDE the rig and 18* outside. Definitely time to get going. We got to the border at Palomas around 10:45am, it took 45 minutes for the paperwork and we now have the new 10 year permit for Tortuga. I doubt it will save us much time in the future as we will still have to get a permit for the Jeep every year as well as our tourist cards. Still, it's a nice improvement.

Our first gas stop the price was 6.64 pesos per liter which comes to $2.31 a gallon. We were still in the border area where gas is a little cheaper so there won't be any big gas savings this year. The next gas stop we were outside the border area and got the standard price of 6.74 a liter, $2.35 a gallon.

We drove 10.5 hours (340 miles) across Mexico's version of west Texas. Long, boring, endlessly similar vistas. We had decided to try out an RV park in the state capitol of Chihuahua called Del Fresno. We found it behind a Pemex gas station and it was surprisingly large with big sites and full hookups available. It was late and we didn't need the hookups but it was a good, safe and quiet place to sleep. There must have been 50 sites there but we were the only RV. We got up at 9am to 38* and grey skies.

Drove all day again through the same grey skies and boring scenery. We pulled over at a toll booth rest area just past Lerdo around 7:30pm. We stayed up late reading some of our stash of english books, at this rate we will have read them all before we get to Akumal.

We woke up at 9am to cold, grey and rain... went back to sleep and slept until 11am. Oh well, no one cares if we get up late. Our only real deadline now is to pick up our friend Country at the Cancun airport on Dec 19th. We started out on a free road that was not very good plus there was a lot of fog so we didn't make much time. Eventually we got on a better road and the fog cleared.