Monday was the definition of a Blue Monday. Seriously. The whole day of driving was almost a comedy of errors, except it wasn't funny. It pretty much took us about 8 hours to do about 2 hours of our planned trip. We left the RV park late as some of our car tyres were a bit flat so we needed to sort them out. We hadn't been driving 5min when one of the cars did a wrong turn so that was a bit of admin getting us all back together. 10min later and a piece of our car fell off while we were driving so we had to stop to pick that up. 10min later we had to stop as the chain from one of the pop up trailers had to be put back as it was dragging on the road.

We were pulled over by the police (first of three times that day) for driving when we shouldn't be driving. Remember how one of my earlier blog entries said how we stayed in the RV park outside Mexico City because only certain cars can drive on certain days in the city? Well apparently there's no way of driving around the city when your GPS takes you onto a freeway you can't drive on. It didn't even take us 5min to be pulled over. It was a very uncomfortable situation, a team of 22 foreigners being pulled over in a country renowned for corruption with only a few fluent Spanish speakers. Three times they had us follow them and pull over in different places. Why? I have no idea. A summary of the outcome is after inspection of papers (drivers licenses and car registrations) one or two of our cars weren't allowed to drive that day. The police wanted to impound all our cars for 2 days, thereafter we'd have to pay a lot of money to get our cars released. Plus we'd have to stay in a hotel for 2 days, and I guess run the risk of one or more of our cars not being allowed to drive again when we were released. Or we could pay an on the spot fine. We phoned one of our team members uncles (he lives in Mexico City) and his advice was whatever we do don't go with the police to their station. So we paid the fine. It was a ridiculous amount but what could we do. 

We'd hardly been driving 20min and we had to stop again. This time not because we were pulled over. Yay. It turned out there was a riot or protest kilometres up the road  (we had masses of riot police and ambulances driving past us). Traffic was blocked up so far, like miles. Lucky we were only stuck there like an hour or so. It could've been the whole day...
So back on the road and 20min later we were pulled over again for driving when we shouldn't be. Aaargh!! This time we were lucky and didn't get fined. An hour later and we saw the familiar sight of 4 police cars flagging us. Flip. Luckily they were just curious as to why there were 5 cars pulled stopped on the side of the freeway, so no fine for us and we weren't really pulled over. By the last pulling over we'd started to get the hang of it and this time we insisted on a sticker showing that we had paid the fine - I as well as others were getting sick of being punished more than once for the same offense. As we were driving away we had to radio in (each car has a walkie talkie so we can communicate with each while we're driving) the RV to say the bumper was dragging on the ground as it was driving away. So out Jesse got, ripped it off and threw it off the side of the road, got back in the RV and drive off without a word. I guess we all hit those times when another is enough.

After the third time of being pulled over we learned that it's not just the city we couldn't drive in, it was the whole state. How do they determine who can and can't drive? Well we discovered the reason for us being pulled over is because one of our license plates ended in a 6, and 6 was the taboo number for the day. 

By this time it was about 4pm and we were uber irritated and hungry. An hour later and we had to pull over as the motorhome had run out of petrol. Lucky we carry extra petrol. Shortly afterwards we found a gas station so we stopped for a much needed late lunch. We also discovered we could stay the night at the gas station, so that was it, we were still at least 5 hours from our planned destination so we decided to call it a day. And what a day it was. What made it worse was we'd started the day with no coffee (it'd been lost short term) plus I'd got bitten on my forehead by something so special it left a welt so big it looked like I'd walked straight into a pole. Aaargh.