Drive to Taxco






Today, there is a fast tourist highway from Mexico City to the beach resort city of Acapulco. In 1951, it was 250 miles of back roads through the mountains. Not just through -- straight across! Unlike our drive from El Paso to Mexico City, where we were driving mostly parallel to the mountains, this drive is at right angles to the flow of the mountain range.

These are serious mountains, the continuation of the geology of the Rockies and the Andes. Mount Popocatepetl, about 30 miles from Mexico City, is an 18,000 foot occasionally active volcano. Its last major eruption was just four years before our trip. There have been small eruptions since then, the most recent in 2016, just a year before I wrote this.