PowerCycle

I’m very happy to report that my sister woke from her coma after 8 days and is doing remarkably well. She has no telekinetic/telepathic powers from what we can tell although we might have her pick the next lotto numbers just in case. All her doctors are just amazed at her progress and really have no idea how her recovery is going to go because they were saying just 4 days ago that she might never wake back up. For the last 2 days she’s been chatting away, scolding her teenage son and just being Stephanie.

Thanks a million for all the supportive emails/calls/cards/posts. It really means a lot.

Made my way to the airport in Merida and have a flight booked for this afternoon to Calgary. Not sure how long I’ll be there. I’ll post an update in a couple days.

04/14 Arrived in the very well-maintained town of Hopelchen and found a decent motel (Hotel Los Arcos). There’s an internet cafe next door so I went over to check for some news on my sister. Unfortunately the news wasn’t good but this web site isn’t supposed to be my diary so we’ll just call this the worst day of my life and leave it at that. Barring any other changes in her condition I’m still planning on heading up there when I get to Cancun.

Lot’s of farmland today. I was surprised to see a white guy wearing a straw hat driving a tractor down the road. It was such a strange sight that I turned around and took another look just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. When I made it to the town center I was even more surprised to see strangely dressed white people all over the place. Turns out they are Mennonites and are quite harmless from what I hear. Apparently the Mexican government hooked them up with some free land so they settled into the area and started growing whatever it is they grow (I think the fields I rode by were corn).

This state is definitely the second worst in Mexico as far as the amount of trash along the side of the road. Number one was Guerrero. There are even a couple large garbage dumps although that still didn’t keep some morons from dumping their garbage right at the entrance to it.

GPX Track

04/13 3 hours of riding around and I finally found a place to stay. Maybe I was getting a little picky but it seemed like everything was over-priced or just a little bit scary. None of the places I looked at were even in the central historic district. At 3pm I tracked a place down near the edge of the city and took my first bus ride back into the touristy area.

Campeche is a very cool place. It was founded back in 1540 and its the oldest Spanish city on the Yucatan peninsula. With no natural land or sea defenses it was an easy target for pirates so a wall, 26 feet tall and a mile and a half long, was built. The wall ended up getting torn down to make way for the growing city but the original gates and bastions still stand.

There are several very large supermarkets here and I went a little crazy buying things. One thing I picked up from a hardware store was a 5″ pair of vice grips. Since I break bolts all the time now maybe I handle some field repair work.

I’m going to change my route to try to get to Cancun a little faster. My sister is still in a coma but she’s stable so I’m going to push on and try to get there in a week. From there I can fly up to Calgary and know that all my belongings are in a safe place.

GPX Track