Boston to Ushuaia on 2 BMW F650GSs - Corporate Runaways

[masukomi]

Who doesn't get tired of the corporate grind? We've decided to run away from our corporate jobs and take our bikes from our home in Boston down to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego - the End of the World. We'll be riding roughly 20,000 miles through 14 countries and we're giving ourselves 4 months to do it. The plan is to avoid civilization whenever possible, camp constantly, enjoy beautiful scenery and hopefully find just enough adventure along the way.

These are our bikes:



This is Kay:



And Dachary:



This is our proposed route:



and this is our website
Corporate Runaways where you'll find these posts, a link to our spot tracker, videos, and more.

We're going to be documenting the journey from the start (yesterday) as we try and make it out of the North East without hitting any snow.

Will our dauntless heroes make it out before the snow strikes? Will the motorcycles be so overloaded that the frames break before they even leave the U.S.? Will hypothermia claim the brave riders and end the trip before it's truly begun?

Stay tuned and enjoy the ride with us!

[Paulo Assis]

End of the world?
It depends.
You will see.
When you are there and have your face looking at the sea... maybe it is the end. But if your backs are to the sea, well, it may be the beggining of America....
Have a good journey.
Remember: if you meet any hipopotamus crossing the road on hunting for some pigmeos, you'd better change your GPS, get back a little and ask some info to the nearest local guy.
My dear heroes: I'll stay tuned!
Cheers!

[masukomi]

Note: Dachary and I (Kay) will both be posting via this account although most of the posts (like this one) will be written by her.
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Motorcycle trips always seem to take longer than you expect to prep, and a 4-month trip over 20,000 miles warrants the extra time. We’d done as much as possible to get ready to go before the big day came, but there was still a lot we had to do the morning of to get the house and dogs ready for the house/dog-sitter, and get us ready for the road. We had some last-minute packing to do, and a few last-minute scares of things we thought we’d forgotten and had to unpack and then re-pack to check. Long story short, we didn’t get on the road until after 11AM, and didn’t hit the interstate (where we’ll be spending much of our time in the U.S.) until close to noon.


Dachary's bike packed to go.


Kay's bike packed to go.



We quickly discovered that Kay’s bike needed some adjustment. The bike was initially having speed wobbles at 65mph. We’d put new chains on the bikes, and added a dry sack duffle to the back of Kay’s bike, but otherwise hadn’t changed the configuration so the wobbles were a mystery. We only got about 15 or 20 miles from Boston before we had to pull off at a service area to check out the bike.

A quick Web search later and we adjusted the pre-load on the front suspension, checked the alignment, checked tire pressures and decided to hit the road again. Cranking up the pre-load helped immensely, but the bike was still wobbling a bit around 70mph and it was decided to stop again before we hit I-84 into Connecticut. We hit another service area just a few miles before the exit, and cranked up the pre-load and added a bit of air to the tires. Of course, the bike was on a slant and when Kay stepped off of it it fell right over. Checking underneath before lifting it revealed that no, the kick-stand hadn't done anything wrong. The bike had simply pivoted on it when it went over. When we got back to the interstate, the bike was riding well. Pre-load and air had done the trick.

By this point it was past lunch time, and we’d been riding in the cold, so we planned to stop at Traveler’s Books and Food in Connecticut. We didn’t realize how close it was to the Massachusetts border and reached it far sooner than expected. Had a tasty lunch, and I got the most amazing grilled cheese and tomato soup combo I’ve had in my life. Seriously. Truly heavenly. If you’re in the area, stop there and eat.


The Perfect Soup and Sandwitch

We managed to get about an hour and a half down the road before we had to stop again. It was time to gas up, and we were getting close to New York City during rush hour, so I decided I’d like a bathroom before we tried to tackle any of NYC’s notoriously traffic-y bridges. The first gas station we hit was a dud, so we rode on until we found a Stop N’ Shop gas station. One of Kay’s ears was hurting so he took the helmet off to adjust and give it a breather, and took glasses off to take the helmet off. And, leaning forwards to set down the helmet, crushed underfoot the glasses which had fallen to the ground in a way that looked impossible to repair.

At this point, it was around 4:30PM and already getting dark. The temperature was around 35 degrees and Kay effectively had no glasses (and needs them to drive). Back-up glasses, you say? Kay doesn’t have any - the plan is to grab some when we hit a border town in Mexico. We were mulling over our options when a guy at the next pump in the gas station heard us talking about the divey looking hotel we’d passed and recommended one just down the road. He said it was cheap but clean, and that’s how we ended up at Shoreline Motel in Milford, CT with the sun setting at 4:30 on a Tuesday.

We only made it 160 miles from home on our first day, but between getting out late, diagnosing bike troubles and broken glasses, there’s not much we could do about it. We prefer not to ride at night anytime, and with the cold it’s really quite dangerous to ride at night, even with our heated gear. We immediately exploded our gear all over the (cheap) hotel room and pulled out the JB Plastic Weld that I remembered we’d brought. Kay went to work fixing glasses while I called around on my never-ending quest to find some Michelin Anakee 2 tires for my bike. A few hours and some Domino’s delivery later, we’re fed and warm, have fixed the glasses, have located some tires for me in Louisiana, and I actually managed to get some work done, too. With one black rim and one white JB Weld rim the glasses look like a reject project from some 1980’s video though.


Kay's JB Welded glasses

Not how I’d have planned our first day, but not horrible. Tomorrow (Wednesday) we’ll try to hit the road earlier (and find some wi-fi so I can send my work off to a client and post stuff to the site for the ride report) and cover some miles. The immediate goal is to put the Great Cold North behind us - the sooner, the better!

[Hippy]

go for it guys! will be interested to follow your story. ride safe!

[masukomi]

Day 1’s casualty was Kay’s glasses. Day 2’s casualty was my boots. I’d gotten the Rev’It Rival H20 boots just a couple of months ago from RevZilla. I called up Neil at RevZilla who spent nearly 40 minutes on the phone with me measuring the calf-size of boots and we decided the Rev’It boots would be my best bet. We didn’t know it until today but it turns out women’s calf muscles extend lower than mens, which makes them wider at the top of boots, and explains why it’s so hard to find an adventure boot that fits a woman well. Anyway, they were great - up until a few weeks ago.

In prep for the trip, we’ve been doing a lot of mini-trips around the area. A few weeks ago we rode down to Rhode Island and rode around with some ADVRider folks in Arcadia and Pachaug. I’ve only been riding for about 7 months, and my inexperience combined with the stock Trailwing (Deathwing) tires on my bike = me falling in the mud a lot (and cracking two ribs). The boots stayed waterproof on this, their initial foray into wetness, and I didn’t think twice.

Fast forward to a week or two later when I tried to don my boots to ride the bike to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t get the left boot to zip up properly. I fussed with it for a few minutes and then handed it to Kay, who was able to work the zipper up and down a bit past the problem spot. It seemed like the zipper was working in so I put it on and rode out. Zipper was even harder to zip on the way home, but I just figured there was some dirt in the zipper from its immersion in mud and thought it would work its way out.

When I put on the boots yesterday, I realized there was a spot where the zipper wasn’t zipping properly. Today, I unzipped the boot completely and tried re-zipping it to get the teeth re-aligned. It wouldn’t go. An even larger portion of the zipper was borked. We manhandled it past the trouble spot and through the hard part just above that and decided to give RevZilla a call and see if they could help us, since we didn’t have time to wait around for a warranty repair. More importantly, we didn’t want to get stuck south of the border with boots that wouldn’t stay closed properly (or at all).


The Zipper of Doom

See those tiny zipper teeth? Ridiculous idea on something that’s going to be down near the dirt. We’re both 100% against the idea of getting motorcycle boots with zippers now - particularly zippers with fine teeth.

I spoke with Chris at RevZilla, who gave me the contact info for Rev’It and offered to help expedite the repair. Unfortunately, even an expedited repair would mean I wouldn’t have riding boots for several days, and we didn’t want to wait around in the cold cold north, in costly motels. We didn’t want to spend the cash, but I made a decision to go to RevZilla since Philly was on our route and see if they could find me another pair of boots. Of course all of this calling around took time and it ended up being after 10:00AM (when Rev’It’s offices opened) before we finally hit the road.

Got to Philly at around 1:45 and the staff at RevZilla were just as awesome in person as they have been on the phone and on ADVRider. There we met Chris who had helped me on the phone, Patrick who helped me try on pretty much every boot they had in my size, and Anthony who does the video/is an owner (the owner?) at RevZilla. Patrick’s family owns property in Costa Rica and he’s ridden as far as Panama and into the Darien Gap on an F650 (he’s hardcore!) and was able to offer us lots of helpful advice.

First though, we had to get the boot off. At some point between putting them on and riding to Revzilla the zipper had come open all the way from the bottom. It took Kay pulling with a Leatherman to get it to move, and then the zipper pull came completely off.

In the end, the pair of boots that fit me best (i.e. fit over my calves, but also fit really well) was the Dainese Visoke D-WP Boots. Sad for me, they were expensive and I hadn’t planned to buy new boots - but they fit so well. Actually, they were the only ones that fit properly at all. And they’re so comfortable. And they kept me nice and warm even in the low 30s we were riding through for much of the day. Of course, we totally forgot to take a picture of me surrounded by opened boot boxes.

Stood around and chatted with the guys at RevZilla for a while and I still can’t say enough good things about these guys. They’re real riders who actually care about their customers and I can’t recommend them highly enough. They’re taking care of the warranty exchange for me on the Rev’It Rival H20 boots (which I’m gonna turn around and sell when I get home - anyone need a pair of boots?) The guys came out to check out the bikes and Anthony took a couple of pictures with us - all three of them were really cool.

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Us at RevZilla

Hadn’t had lunch yet and by the time we left RevZilla it was 3pm. Anthony had recommended a Pork Shack around the corner for lunch but they closed at 3 so we had to make due with the IHOP across the street. Not the most exciting cuisine, but warm food relatively cheap. By the time we got back on the road it was close to 4PM. We rode until around 5:30 to get to the Days Inn hotel we had chosen for the night (because it had WiFi and wasn’t exorbitantly priced) in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Day 2 tally: 242 miles. Milford, CT to Aberdeen, MD. Again, a short day, but we spent a while at RevZilla (and getting off the interstate in Philly) and hit the road late because of all of the calling around. If the attrition continues at this rate, we’ll be broke sometime in Mexico - gotta stop having these expensive malfunctions! But it was lucky we were near RevZilla and they were open. I am loving the new boots and hopefully the unexpected expense doesn’t set us back too far in the long run.

Goal for tomorrow: break 300 miles! (We’ve done around 400 comfortably before, but the cold, the wind, the fact that the sun sets around 4:30pm and all of the delays have been costing us mileage. We want to get south where it’s warmer, damnit!

Side note #1: Revzilla’s toilet revs.

Side note #2: Today’s unsung hero was the 5-function digital meter we got from Aerostich. It includes a battery voltage meter, which we were able to watch while riding and determine when our heated gear was drawing too much power. In stop-and-go traffic, there’s less available voltage and having the heated gear cranked could prevent the battery from charging properly. With the meter in place, we could keep an eye on our voltage and turn down the grips/jacket as needed to keep our batteries happy.

[masukomi]

With all the delays of the past couple of days, we were both getting a bit discouraged by our lack of progress and apprehensive about what might happen next. Our big goal has always been to get further south where it gets warm, but we just haven’t been able to make the miles we’d expected. We’d planned to be much further along, but we made a big push today - from Aberdeen, MD to Burlington, NC - 384 miles.

Today’s big note was cold. It was 17 degrees when we started loading up the bikes, and they were covered in frost.


Frosty Morning

Horse didn’t want to start - took a little extra throttle - and both bikes were a bit demanding until they warmed up. We felt the same way. We ran into traffic fairly steadily from just north of Baltimore until we got south of Washington, D.C., so it took us 2.5 hours to get south of D.C. By then, I really needed a bathroom break and decided it would make the most sense to combine with lunch to avoid excessive down time.

We got off I-95 at Woodbridge, and when we spotted a Denny’s, we both jumped on it. Kay ordered 6 eggs sunny side up, bacon, toast and hot tea, and I contented myself with an American slam and coffee.

Neither of us felt particularly hungry when we stopped, but as soon as we went inside, we started shivering. We didn’t realize how cold we were until we got off the bikes and went into a warm building. We lingered over lunch with warm drinks for nearly an hour, until we got our core body temperatures up.

The break made a huge difference. It’s always nice to get off the bike and stretch every few hours, but warming up made a dramatic difference in the cold. We both felt warmer after lunch, and we were downright cheerful and energetic when we hit the road and it turned out the outside temperature had warmed up, too. We felt like we could keep going all day at that point, and we had a very pleasant couple of hours. We celebrated when Kay’s temperature gauge hit 15.8 degrees Celsius (mine indicated around 44 degrees Fahrenheit), singing about it in the helmets and dancing on the bikes. It was awesome to feel warm.

Sadly, when we hit I-85 and turned further inland, the temperature started dropping dramatically. As we made our way west across North Carolina, it got colder and colder. We started seeing snow left over from a storm they had over the weekend, and our spirits dropped with the return of the cold. By 3PM, we were riding on sheer will alone - neither of us felt like being on the bikes in the cold anymore but we both wanted to get more miles under our belts.

By the time we arrived at the hotel where we’re staying in Burlington, we were chilled to the core. We took a few minutes to take things off the bike and then straight into a hot shower, when we discovered that Kay’s Aerostich Kanetsu heated vest had left red burn marks in his back.


Aerostich Kanetsu Burns

We first saw the marks at least 10 minutes after turning off the heated gear, and two hours later, the marks have faded somewhat but are still burned into Kay’s back.

Today’s lesson? Don’t buy the Aerostich Kanetsu heated vest. And we’ve discovered that we can do a long day even in the cold, but even being a few degrees warmer makes a dramatic difference.

[T.H.E]

Sounds like an ambitious trip, Just wanted to say good luck and be safe out there. Buy extra O rings for your Optimus stove while you're in US, they WILL break and you can never have enough O rings. Buy at least 20 in all sizes and take them with you. I don't see spare tires on your bikes, you know that tires are out of this world expensive down here, don't ya? Take two rear tires with you and buy new ones in Colombia. (the cheapest). a typical tire for your bike in Ushuaia will cost you $400 IF you can find it.

[masukomi]

(Kay again)
You know, we kind of liked our cheap little room I think. Except that the toilet paper roll was directly under a pipe which got condensation and dripped on it. It was cold, of course, because few of the hotels seem to have heat, but there were plenty of thick blankets that Dachary stole and kept me pressed against her all night. We slept in till 8 (normally we wake before seven) and continued our way south. The room felt cold, but when we went outside, we discovered that the room was actually quite warm… it was COLD outside!

When we went to pick up the bikes, we found a thick fog (pea soup comes to mind) that stuck to everything and made everything damp and visibility crap. I've never seen visibility this poor, in fact - you literally couldn't see more than 20 feet away. It made driving a bit of an adventure as we couldn't see cars coming when we tried to turn out from the parking lot or turn onto the main road. Within a few miles of leaving the town, though, the fog had dissipated somewhat and visibility was a bit better - which is good, because we were entering wet twisty roads through the mountains. (Kay maintains that it wasn't fog, at all, but a low-lying cloud, since we were up quite high in the mountains at that point.)


We stumbled into a caldera

Rode for about 30 minutes and it was getting colder… so we decided to stop at the next Pemex we found and grab some munchies and… pull out the heated gear! Yes, that's right - it was so cold this morning that we broke out the heated gear. It was in the high 30 degree range when we set out this morning. By noon, we'd gotten to a place where it was around 60 degrees and put our heated gear away… but Kay pulled his out again when we were crossing through some mountains just to have the extra layer - not for the heat. It was chilly riding today.

Eventually we had to decide… toll road, or free road? Sick of tiny towns slowing us down and wishing we were farther along in the journey than we were, we went for the toll road and it was awesome. Cost us about $140 Mex each when you added up all the toll booths but it was beautiful.

Sadly, just before the toll road there were a handful of stands with chicken on spits that looked delicious, but it wasn't quite lunch time so we pressed on. There were similar stands on the last toll road, we figured there would be on this one too. Wrong.

I think there was only one place to eat on the entire road and it was a restaurant by a Pemex. As noted before we don't have great luck with restaurants, but food was required so we went in, had something with chicken green sauce, black bean paste, fries, and rice. The fries were cold. The chicken pretty tasteless by itself, but when you combined chicken, rice, and green sauce into the tortillas it was pretty tasty… until we hit the last three tortillas that were hard and probably left over from the last batch.



Testing the Smile Detection on Dachary's camera

New rule: if you see meat on a spit or barbecue and it's remotely close to meal time. Eat. Even if you're not really hungry yet.

In the parking lot we had a surprisingly successful conversation with a guy who turned out to have ridden from Alaska (we think… i forgot where exactly) to Guatemala. He's got a BMW, a Hayabusa, and a Harley, but said that in Mexico he almost exclusively rides the BMW. He suggested that he was too mucho for a 650 like ours and had a 1200.

Back on the road was more beautiful Nevada-like landscape with beautiful green mountains. The cuota (pay road) to Oaxaca was surprisingly picturesque. The mountains were on both sides of us for much of the day, with some wide, sweeping turns through them at points. We actually got to go around 110 KPH (around 65 MPH) for hours! And we passed people. Loads of people. This was quite novel as it's usually us getting passed for adhering to the speed limit. It was a bit of a boost to our riding spirits.

We'd decided to get a hotel again because it's still getting down into the thirties at night in central Mexico, and after some miscommunications and frustrations between ourselves we eventually grabbed one, but my dictionary failed me, and it seems that whenever i say the word for heat they think i mean color tv. So we ended up with an overpriced (but nice) room with color tv, no heat, and barely adequate blankets (when we stole the blanket from the second bed).

New rule from yesterday: When it's cold in Mexico and you're getting a hotel room always get one with two beds even if one bed would be fine. The logic being that you can then steal the blankets from the second bed.

[masukomi]

The plan today was to get up early and visit the ruins of Monte Alban. Unfortunately, the hotel last night had internet and we ended up screwing around on the Web longer than we intended. By the time we got to Monte Alban, it was around 10:30AM, and we still hadn't eaten breakfast. We hadn't had dinner last night, so it was imperative to feed me - I was extremely crashy and would have been no good at all for the ruins. We ate breakfast at the cafe at the Monte Alban site (mine was surprisingly tasty), so it was close to 11:30 by the time we entered the ruins themselves.


Monte Alban Ruins


Kay at Monte Alban Ruins


You gotta get the shot...


Dachary at Monte Alban Ruins

What to say about the Monte Alban ruins? It's a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a pretty substantial one. The site consists of a large complex - I'm pretty sure it's larger than the site at El Tajin. The setting was also quite impressive. It's situated on a plateau surrounded by a valley, and there's mountains all around. The ruins themselves are pretty well preserved, and you can actually climb some of the temples/climb to higher levels of the complex, which is one of the things we lamented that you couldn't do at El Tajin.

But honestly? I can speak for both of us when we say that we appreciated El Tajin more. We arrived at Monte Alban late, and it was absolutely littered with people. You couldn't get a good shot of the place without people in it. There were people coming by the busload. That's a turn-off. On the one hand, it's totally great that people appreciate the site. But on the other hand, all the people make it more difficult to appreciate the site. Kay kept noting the silence when we found ourselves away from the groups for a moment, and contends that while it's not as enjoyable with the people, even without them Monte Alban just fails to spark our interest.

Kay said at one point that the site just didn't capture his imagination the way El Tajin did, and I have to agree. There were plaques around Monte Alban with information about fauna and how environment played such an important role in the lives of the Monte Albans, but I just didn't seem to see that in the way the site was built. Or at least the way it's maintained today.

The plateau where Monte Alban is situated is surrounded by cities (Oaxaca on three sides) - littered with structures and people everywhere. You can't look at the horizon and see it as the people of Monte Alban did, and it's virtually impossible to imagine it uncluttered. Technically both peoples were war-like, but the carvings at the Monte Alban site were well-preserved and images of subjugation - carvings of castrated rulers that the Monte Albans conquered and executed, images representing the cities and cultures that the Monte Alban people subjugated and ruled.

El Tajin had some similar carvings, but there was also beauty at the site. At one part of the site, they have a straw roof erected to protect some colored paint that had survived intact. As far as I could tell, the scenes from the painted depictions were ornamental and scenes of every-day life - not the war-like scenes that dominated Monte Alban. Maybe there was paint like this in Monte Alban, too, once upon a time… and maybe I've romanticized El Tajin because I didn't read as much there about the "war-like culture" but I just didn't get the same feel from both sites.

Regardless of my perceptions versus the reality of the sites, Monte Alban was still an impressive site. I just think Kay and I didn't appreciate it as much as El Tajin. We'd 100% recommend anyone who is thinking of seeing ruins like this to check out El Tajin. Monte Alban? It's significant enough that it probably shouldn't be skipped, but we simply didn't enjoy it as much.

Oh yeah. Did I mention that we both got sunburned today? I have suntan lotion in my tank bag, which we carried around all day, and at one point I even thought of it… but then dismissed the thought. That was a mistake. Both of our faces are sunburned. Kay's arms are sunburned… mine might be, too, but it's too early to tell. (My arms are tanned to begin with.) The back of my neck is sunburned… I'd forgotten what it's like to have hair this short. And Kay insists that his eyebrows got bleached. We'll blame it on the anti-Malarial pills, which we started today (although technically we should have started it two days ago - woops!) - we chose Doxycycline, which has the side effect of making users more sensitive to sun, as opposed to the pills which make you paranoid.

Yeah. Let's just chalk this one up to the pills instead of our own idiocy.

Also? Parking at Monte Alban isn't big-bike friendly. The road up to Monte Alban is great, up until toward very top - where it turns into essentially a wide single lane or very narrow two-lane road. Even that's not bad for a motorcycle, though… until you get to the top. The top of the hill is steeply angled, and the parking lot itself is dirt. The dirt has been tracked back onto the pavement leading into the parking lot. I tried braking at the top of the paved road while waiting for another car to go into the parking lot and it didn't work - my bike started sliding backwards. There was nothing I could do about it - couldn't go forward and there was a car behind me so I just had to wait for it to stop slipping. I think it did actually hit the car behind me but they didn't seem to care so I didn't make any attempt to investigate.

Beyond that, though, the guy in the parking lot directed us with our large, heavy, overloaded motorcycles to park in the "bicycle" parking area. Basically it's a hill on an incline, covered with sparse grass and dirt, with some bike parking racks. He motioned us with our motos to park up there. Kay went first, and had to let his bike back into the wall and rest there on a pannier, because the incline was too steep and his overburdened bike would have gone over if it hadn't been resting on the wall. I did similar, but didn't have to park it against the wall.

I was freaking out as I tried to ride it up in the dirt on the incline, though. I tried to ride it a bit further and park it at a more favorable angle on the incline, but when I tried to stop, it just started sliding backward in the dirt and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The bike didn't go over, but I was extremely unnerved and left it parked badly there, annoyed that the parking lot attendant wouldn't let us park in the relatively flat dirt area used by the cars.

When we came out, I asked Kay to back my bike out and set it up for me because I didn't feel confident that I wouldn't just drop it with the dirt and the slipping and it being so heavy. Kay was obliging, and it was relatively easy to back mine out from the angle where we'd parked it (although Kay's left foot kept slipping in the dirt from the weight of the bike, but he managed to keep it upright). Unfortunately, the incline was so steep that we couldn't park it on the side stand once we got the bike back to the road. Kay had to hold it while I geared up, and then I had to mount the bike to hold it there while Kay got his bike.

His bike, on the other hand, wasn't so easy. The angle he'd parked at (so his pannier could lean against the wall, preventing his bike from falling over while parked) wasn't as favorable for backing it out and turning it around. He pulled it forward a bit and tried backing it out, but it was closer to the wall than mine had been and at one point he was stepping on the bike racks, using them for leverage to keep his foot from slipping in the dirt like mine had.

Unfortunately, the proximity to the wall didn't give him room to get a nice angle with the weight of the bike, and before he could back it all the way past the wall, the bike overbalanced and tipped with him under it. He says it was one of those really slow falls that you totally see coming but you know there's nothing you can do about it. He and the bike were too close to the bike rack for him to get enough leverage to keep it upright, so he went down with the bike tented over him.

While I was pondering whether to drop mine to go to his aid, two of the parking attendants who had been sitting on the wall and watching, smirking, while Kay pulled my bike out, ran to help. They got the bike upright and off of Kay, and helped him balance it the rest of the way out. I'm kinda glad they ended up helping with his bike - they got to see how heavy the bikes really are. It wasn't just that I'm a chick that I had Kay back my bike out… it's that these bikes are motha-effing HEAVY and I didn't think I could do it in the dirt without dropping it.

So yeah. Kay's bike got to take another dirt nap. And I was stuck sitting on my bike holding it up so I couldn't either run to help him, or photo-document it.

Aside from that, the day was pretty mundane. It took us forever to get out of Oaxaca, as we had to stop for gas and grab lunch (it was 3PM when we started to actually get out of the city). However, as we were leaving Oaxaca, Kay spotted chickens on a spit on the side of the road, which invoked our new rule of "If it's remotely close to time to eat, and you see food roasting on a spit on the side of the road, stop and eat." So we had to stop and eat chicken la carbon. An entire chicken, by the way? A bit too much for the two of us to eat.


Chicken on a Spit

We only made it a total of 89 miles before we had to stop for the day. The sun was starting to set and we were both just feeling drained. I'd checked the weather last night while we had internet access, and had discovered that there was only one very narrow area where it would actually be warm enough for us to camp. Otherwise, we'd be crossing mountains (which takes forever, by the way, but has lots of great twisties) and the temperatures would be too cold (sub 40-degrees) for us to comfortably camp.

Unsurprisingly, we didn't make it to the area where it would be warm enough for us to camp. We were stuck riding in the mountains* and thought we'd have to push through and ride them after dark to the next major city, but just happened upon a hotel on the side of the road at a town that we passed through in two minutes of riding. The room is tiny but clean (although it lacks a toilet seat) and we've actually taken the time to watch some TV on the iPad. For a little over $13 US, we won't complain. (Cheapest hotel yet, by the way!)

Unfortunately, as we've been sitting here, we've discovered a couple of unfortunate companions sharing the room… first an ant, which prompted me to take our snacky foods far from the bed… and then an insect that Kay has dubbed a "Thing that Must Be Killed." And proceeded to kill it with one of our boots. This has led me to examine the mysterious stains on the wall next to the bed, which appear upon closer inspection to be squashed bugs.

Ick. Hopefully they don't carry us away in our sleep. (Maybe I'll try sleeping with the light on? Or would that make it worse?)


* poor us, stuck riding beautiful twisties with the setting sun behind us.