All photos courtesy Lou Corsaro and northbound from Ensenada except the first photo (last few don't count, they're on a side road).


A school zone instead of a zona escolar, SB with Highway 1 in El Sauzal.


Starting off on Highway 2 - no, make that 3 - one of the first signs tells you to obey the signs. Well, in that case I must be on Highway 2 because a sign told me so. There's no bigger waste of money than a sign telling you to obey signs - if you disobey one sign, you just disobeyed this one as well. Or is that how México increases revenues at a traffic stop? "You blatantly ignored two signs when you ran that 'STOP.'" "But there was only one intersection!" "Yes, well, remember that sign 50 km ago to obey the signs? You sure didn't."


Normalcy is restored and Highway 3 heads north through the rocky Sierra de Juárez (Juárez Mountains) with its unique Mexican "3" digits. The 90 km sign is a sad harbinger of ugly fonts to come.


Entering Tecate, like the beer, where the street sign confirms that the city is, in fact, the beer. Or maybe they're just closely related. I wonder if the McDonalds sells Tecate. (Answer: Yes, because anything that's made inside is part of Tecate.) The withered sign at the pedestrian bridge unsurprisingly tells people to use it, so hopefully they've figured that out by now. Before I leave this caption, please note my admiration for the nearly correct California route shield at Calle Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (I assume everything is a Calle until told otherwise), and additional admiration for even having a new sign up. The next couple of photos will show you the alternative, and it isn't much prettier than the crumbling Mexicali sign.


Calle Hidalgo y Costilla EB and WB at Highway 3. The WB sign is ordinary, though just as old as the EB one, but a blue California shield in a Mexican font takes the cake. Was this green 40 years ago and just has a weird way of fading? Again, why can't México ask the USA for their design? The patched arrow indicates new traffic patterns at the border - cars must now proceed eastward, head up alongside the border fence, and come back west into Customs. I guess that's one way to mitigate growing lines.


Next block east on Hidalgo, where Presidente Abelardo L. Rodríguez is still not influential enough to let you use his street to the border. Oh, and he's dead, as are all of the Presidents who have streets in this neighborhood. This was formerly the heavy vehicle route to the border (Highway 3/Calle Presidente Pascual Ortiz Rubio being the car route), but now everyone has to head over a kilometer out of town together and come a kilometer back together before getting to the separate border entrances half a block apart.

Old Highway 1/3, Ensenada

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