A rolling stone

We passed the 5000km mark on our trip odometer today. I guess it will wrap before we get home. Last night we stayed in a cheap no tell motel in Chihuahua. The desk clerk was very friendly, the room was very clean, if rather basic, and the noise was about what you would expect: couples coming and going and the noise of the freeway outside. Tonight we paid about twice as much for our hotel. The room is much more nicely appointed, certainly with a better grade of toilet paper, but there is a very loud rock stage in the square outside that may continue until the wee hours, and as I write this at 8:30pm, the wall behind me vibrates occasionally as workmen on the other side hammer or drill into it as they renovate the street-facing shop. Hopefully they'll knock off for the night sometime soon. We are now veterans of the Mexican highway system. The toll roads make for easy driving. In Durango, the non-toll highways follow the convention that slower vehicles must pull onto the shoulder to let faster vehicles pass. However, the road is narrow enough that vehicles traveling in the opposite direction also need to pull over onto the shoulder to allow the pass to complete. The upshot is that you always need to be alert for traffic coming in the other direction in your lane. Makes for more challenging driving. It has been interesting to observe the variations in the desert flora along the trip: mesquite and occasional Joshua trees in the Mojave, mesquite+saguaro cactus+barrel cactus in the Sonoran desert, sand dunes+mesquite+prickly pear+pistachios in Chihuahua, giant Dr. Seuss yuca+pecans+pistachios in Durango. Our travels today were uneventful. We encountered several army patrols along the highway; even drove in convoy with one for half an hour or so before they stopped using both lanes and let us pass. I'm not sure whether the extra patrols make me feel safer or more concerned, but either way, nothing of note happened.