Sorry, your princess is in another castle

Today was a long driving day. Probably the longest of the trip. We had a military checkpoint. They have these at various places looking for guns or drugs or whatever. Usually we are waved through. Occasionally they pick one or two vehicles in our group to inspect. Yesterday, they opened a cabinet from another vehicle in our group and a pair of dirty boxers fell from the cabinet onto the guard’s head.

The checkpoint we had today is the one on the trip most likely to stop us. On the way south the guard took a few Cokes from one of the vehicles in our caravan. Today they asked to enter almost every vehicle in our group. The guard who was checking ours opened our cabinets and asked where we were from and where we were going. They only opened our cabinets with the clean underwear. They asked another RV to open all their slides, which takes some time. The whole process took a while, but we made it to our campsite with time to set up before our cooking class.

The cooking class was a make-up class. We are back in Guerrero Negro, the town where we saw the whales on the southbound portion. The main restaurant is Mario’s cafe. We were scheduled for a cooking class earlier but Mario wasn’t available and we had to reschedule.

Today Mario showed us how he makes guacamole and then chili relleños. We were surprised that he didn’t use lime juice to keep the guacamole from going brown. Mario was surprised that we keep guacamole long enough to get brown. We were also surprised that Mario uses a giant machete-like knife just to make guacamole. We were also surprised that his chili relleños use an egg wash without flour. We learned from Horacio, the assistant wagon master, that there are a lot of regional variations of the dish. There were a lot of surprises in today’s cooking class.

Several of you following this blog have asked about cake. There was no bakery nearby in Ciudad Constitución, where we spent Greg’s birthday. So no third birthday cake. However, there was cake for dessert tonight. So we are getting almost enough cake.