Arizona to Central Mexico – October 2018

Motivated by a strong desire to get out of the still-oppressive heat in Tucson and the travel bug, in September I started doing online searches for travel destinations in Central Mexico, the first leg of a three-month stay south of the border.

Research and Reservations

I was pleasantly surprised to find a one-way plane ticket from Hermosillo, Sonora to Guadalajara for $55 on the Mexican airline Volaris. That was the total cost of the ticket, which included a $16 baggage fee and taxes.

I purchased the ticket on Expedia, because the Volaris website came across as being somewhat predatory in looking for ways to nickel-and-dime upsell the travel costs. Do you want to select your seat? That’ll be another $8. And the like.

Having only general information about the region where I wanted to travel, I planned with the assumption that there would be adequate bus service to the destinations on the dates when we needed it. And it was. In fact, we traveled most of the way on a luxury bus line that I had never heard of prior to arriving there.

I reserved the hotels on Booking.com, because they have good coverage of hotels in Mexico (even some of the smaller and more modest properties), they generally do not require an up-front payment and they have reasonable cancellation policies.

There are some important things to know about making Mexico hotel reservations on the Booking.com website though, more on that in a future post.

Tucson to Hermosillo

When traveling to Hermosillo from Tucson I generally take a bus. Mexican bus lines Tufesa and Transportes Pacifico (TAP) offer comfortable bus travel between the two cities.

This time though, because I was going to meet my traveling companion in Nogales I opted to take a shuttle van to the border, which was a mistake. The shuttle took more than two hours to make the 45-minute drive to the border.

Fortunately, we had an evening flight and I had left early in the morning, but if the time requirements had been compressed the shuttle would have caused real problems.

We had lunch in Nogales, Sonora and boarded a TAP bus for the three-hour ride to Hermosillo. There, we took a taxi from the bus station to the airport.

On future trips I will be contacting Uber for the ride, because during my travels I discovered that Uber drivers provide excellent and inexpensive service (especially when compared to taxis) in Guadalajara and other Mexican cities. More on that in a future post.

Hermosillo to Guadalajara

Air travel baggage and security requirements are the same in Mexico as in the U.S., but the security staff in Hermosillo kept the lines moving very well.

Volaris provided very good service and their ground crew was very efficient in quickly getting passengers on the plane, a line of travelers showing the electronic boarding pass from their cell phones to be scanned before moving down the jetway.

The flight was packed, the seats were cramped, but in less than two hours’ time we were on the ground in Guadalajara. Yes. Considering the price and end result, it was completely worth any minor travel discomfort.

The Trip Ahead

We spent a week exploring the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco before moving on to destinations in the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Querétaro and Michoacán.

The cities we visited were: San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco; Leon, Irapuato, Guanajuato, Celaya and San Miguel de Allende (all in Guanajuato; Querétaro, Querétaro; and Morelia and Uruapan, Michoacán.

It was a marvelous, relaxing trip as we did self-directed tours of our destination cities, with lots of walking, taking photos and learning about local history and culture.