Bernal is another of Mexico’s pueblos magicos.  It is a small town of about 3000 people, best known for La Peña de Bernal, which is, according to some sources, the world’s third largest monolith, after Gibraltar and Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro.   And Peña, for those of you who may be wondering, translates as “cliff”….nothing sexual.

We secured a nice place next to a hotel to set up our rig, with a great view of La Peña.

Poinsettias grow into small trees in Mexico.

Another view from our camping spot. Remember the green tennis court in the picture for later in this post.

Being a weekend we shared the town with lots of local tourists.  The town has many cozy restaurants and lots of nice shops.  In particular, there were some beautiful wool scarfs for about 3 CAD and beautiful straw hats for about the same price…if only we had more room in our rig!

The Peña de Bernal can be seen from just about everywhere in town.

We sat on a rooftop patio as the sun went down with the intention of having a drink and an appetizer before returning home to cook dinner.  We ordered wine and a cheese and fruit plate.  There must have been about a kilo of cheese on the plate, all from local producers, and we couldn’t even finish it.  Dinner just didn’t happen after that.

View of La Peña and the church from the restaurant.

The next morning we climbed part way up La Peña, as far as you could go without using ropes and harnesses.    There were plenty of people both hiking and rock climbing that day.

Rock climbers.

If you zoom in enough and know what you are looking for you can spot our rig above the green tennis courts…kind of hard to see though.

Blue blue sky!

Part of the trail heading down.

That evening we had planned on cooking the chicken that we didn’t cook the night before.  We have been having problems with our fridge, and when I opened the package, I immediately smelled something pretty bad, so into the garbage went the chicken.

Our fridge is a 3 way fridge, meaning it can operate off of propane, electricity or battery.  Problem is that it is not working on propane right now, and our battery doesn’t hold enough juice to operate the fridge for long in these temperatures.  The parts Derek needs to fix it are hard to find in Canada, let alone in Mexico.  I was able to find the parts for sale on Amazon, but to ship them here was going to be horribly expensive.  So, I had the parts shipped to my niece, Randi, and she will ship them on to us to pickup at a Fedex office along the route.  When I explained our problem by email to Randi she replied immediately, sympathizing with our predicament, and assuring us that “Mission Cold Beer” was a go!