Another Milestone

Earlier this week we went to nearby Celeya to visit Costco.  There's another, larger Costco in Queretaro, but QTO is further and larger, so traffic is crazier.  We don't much like driving in QTO, unless we can stay on the outskirts.  There is a wonderful grocery store on the outskirts, but Costco, Home Depot, and Sams Club are all further inside the city.

Now, going to Costco is not a big deal (we used to go quite often when our friends were running a restaurant and didn't have a car), but we hadn't been in over two months.  First there was the Hawai'ian cruise, then once back in SMA we were being cheap thrifty to make up for the money we spent on the cruise.  No big shopping trips.

So there we were, driving along towards Celeya, commenting on the view.  The Presa is finally filling back up - not completely normal (you can still make out the church steeple) but much better than it was; luckily San Miguel doesn't depend upon the Presa for our water supply.  The pedestrian walkway over the highway had finally been completed: the concrete superstructure had been finished for some time, but the railings had taken a bit longer. The interchange had been finished and there was no longer a detour.

The interchange had been finished!!!

You should understand that when we moved to San Miguel about two-and-a-half years ago, the highway was under construction - or re-construction.  Although part of the road was left mostly intact, most of it was receiving a widening job and the section through the mountains just south of San Miguel was being rerouted to improve the grade, which necessitated a great deal of work cutting new pathways through the hills.

So our introduction to the highway was one of washboard dirt.  Slow, bumpy, and dusty all at once.  The highway was being reworked in honor of the country's Bicentennial - and, by golly, it was to be finished before 2010.  Well, it was finished almost during 2010.  It was a really big job and although there were mechanical aids, a lot of work here is still done by hand.

We were so glad when it was finished and we could drive to/from Celeya easily.

Then, one day, it was torn up again.  This time at the intersection of a highway that enters only from the west.  It would seem that in their hurry to finish during the Bicentennial year, they took a shortcut and didn't build the overpass with connecting ramps to the other road.  So we spent many more months of driving down 'temporary' ramps, making U-turns, and driving up another 'temporary' ramp to get back on the highway.  More slow, washboard, and dusty roads -- this time with the added thrill of an ever-changing (and not well-marked) traffic pattern.  I think once we took a shortcut that we weren't supposed to take!

Things were still torn up when we last drove to Celeya, but they managed to finish the work in our absence.  It was a glorious drive both ways!  And I must assume anyone entering or leaving the highway at that intersection was enjoying the new routing, too.

Oh, yeah, Costco was great, too.  Especially their pizza, which is a pretty faithful copy of NOB Costco pizza.  We just don't slather it with mayonnaise or ketchup as the locals do!  Jalapeños are another story, however.