Friday, March 11, 2011

Mennonite Country

Today was a travel day thru some beautiful farm country. We left Casas Grande early and drove slowly (this is the hardest part of these caravans for John -- we never got over 45 mph.) We had some good roads but mostly narrow, bumpy roads. Our destination was Cuauhtemoc (quow-tay-moke, accent on tay, soft moke). This area is home to over 40,000 Mennonites, most who are refuges from Canada. There are over 70,000 Minnonites in all of Mexico. We are about an hour west of Cuidad Chihuahua in the state of Chihuahua.

The fields extend to over 75 miles north of Cuauhtemoc. The soil was very black and rich looking. This is not the growing season so most fields were empty. It was really pretty with low mountains surrounding the valley. The apple industry contributed to much of the growth in this area. They have very hard rains in the summer with lots of hail, so we saw many black nets rolled in an inverted 'V' among the apple trees. These will be pulled over the trees to protect them from the hail.

The RV park is run by Peter Lowean and his family and is located in front of his grain elevators. Electricity was an issue! We set us camp THREE times before finding a site with good electric. We had hoped to be able to shower here but because of a freeze earlier this winter there is no hot water! I will NOT take a cold shower, so we will be showering in the RV!

Our next adventure was the bus ride to the restaurant for dinner. We all got in the bus, drove for 1 block and the bus died! So Peter rounded up 3 cars to get 20 people to dinner. By the time we finished eating, the bus was fixed.

No comments: