Today, we left Puebla State and made the 230-mile trip south to the small town of Santa Maria del Tule, just outside Oaxaca City.
Tule is yet another town we never would have planned to spend time in if it didn’t have an RV park.
That’s just sort of how it’s been for us over the past six months—being cool with staying where there are services and facilities to accommodate us instead of trying to visit all the top destinations in Mexico and staying in parking lots or along plazas.
Our Mexico-USA RV Journey 2024-25
Fortunately, a lot of these places end of being interesting destinations, and some are even Pueblos Magicos.
In addition to being a 20-30 minute bus or colectivo ride away from the UNESCO-designated city of Oaxaca de Juarez (Oaxaca City), Tule is known for its massive 2,000-year-old tree (El Arbol del Tule). It also happens to be a popular stop on the Oaxaca Mezcal Trail.
And its RV park seems to be a favorite with both families and overlanders doing the Panamerican or looking for a place to lay low for a while.
I expected a tough day of driving today. In the end, most of the 230-mile drive from Cholula to Tule was surprisingly pleasant and easy, with lots of spectacular scenery to take in along the way.
Our least favorite part of the drive was making our way through Oaxaca City, which, on paper looked straight forward enough. In reality, it was one of the most stressful places I’ve driven in the RV.
We arrived on the heels of a torrential downpour, for one, making a lot of the roads in town a muddy and soupy mess. Traffic was about as bad as we’ve encountered anywhere in Mexico. And to top it off, we quickly realized there were heavy vehicle restrictions along our intended route.
Signage in Mexico isn’t exactly clear most times, leaving a lot of on-the-fly guessing and finger crossing.
At least this time, there was one small faded sign that said heavy vehicles must use Rivieras. We had no idea what Rivieras was, but a minute of sleuthing on Google maps turned up an avenue with that name on the periphery of town. That must be what they mean.
Minutes later after changing course, we found ourselves behind a long line of stinky double dump trucks. Then, we found ourselves in the middle of what appeared to be the city landfill, right across from one of the city’s biggest livestock and produce markets. I’ll leave it to you to imagine what the aroma may have been like.
We slowly made our way down Riveras and onto Avenida Ferrocarril, which was mostly a big mud pit.
Thirty minutes later, we finally arrived in Tule, where we spent way too long navigating a flooded, pothole-filled road, turning onto an absolute muddy mess of a dirt road that I thought for sure we’d get stuck in. Turns out, the RV park was completely surrounded by two blocks of this stuff in all directions.
The RV Park has a “Family Area” up front with a big pool and playground, and an “Adults Only” area in another part of the property. This is a picture of the main Adults Only lot in the back (on a much nicer day):
I much preferred the Family Area because it had established trees and was more put together. The main lot is basically a grassy field.
We’ve got a nice big corner of the RV Park all to ourselves with a few big shade trees, a couple of different paved slabs, and a swing. Here in the middle of rainy season, it would have been nice to have a paved pad next to the rig instead of a bunch of wet clay, but that’s really my only complaint for now.
On the other side of the property, there’s a large playground, two swimming pools, and a communal pavilion and kitchen.
The seedlings we planted in Teotihuacan seem to be doing well.
After getting ourselves situated at the RV park, the sky didn’t look too threatening, so we thought we’d make the walk into Tule and check things out.
Not a whole lot going on, but an agreeable little town nonetheless.
One of Tule’s best features is its Gastronomic Market. Haven’t seen a food market in Mexico so well organized and tidy with so many little stalls selling local dishes.
We tried a little bit of everything.
Dengue is a real issue down here in Oaxaca, especially in the rainy season. That means long sleeves and lots of repellant for us.
There was a Dutch family with two young kids at the RV park when we arrived. It wasn’t exactly a surprise as Lori had been in contact with the mom for a few weeks leading up to our arrival.
There’s also a Canadian family that she’s been in contact with that will be coming through here in the next few days, so it sounds like there will be no shortage of kids to play with for the boys.
We’ve been astonished how few families with kids we’ve crossed paths with at this point in our journey, especially given that we’ve been plying a fairly popular route. Hopefully as we start coming out of rainy season, we’ll see more along the way.
Rainy season has also meant more time indoors than we ever thought we’d do in an RV. I took the opportunity to teach Noe a bit of kid-coding with a popular app called Scratch Jr. He seemed to like it at first, but lost interest pretty fast. I thought that maybe it might be something Riley could tackle in a few years, but he was adamant about giving it a try.
After a couple of tutorials he was off and running and can’t get enough.
It shouldn’t surprise me I guess, as Riley’s always been more interested in techy things. Noe can take it or leave it. He prefers his outdoor explorations and reading books.
It’s fun to see the boys’ respective personalities surfacing at these ages and we get a lot of time to observe that all living together in the RV. Especially three months into a very rainy wet season.
