PowerCycle

08/25 Not long after leaving Santa Rosa the road dropped down pretty fast into a valley which afforded some nice views for almost the entire day. Not too many villages but there were a couple little tiendas were I could get some aqua. The mountains in Honduras are not quite what I expected based on the ITMB map. I kind of thought I’d be in some crazy, rugged mountain ranges since the map has so many shades of brown on it. The mountains here are all tree-covered and generally not more than 5000 feet or so. There was one big range just to the west called Cordillera de Celaque that apparently has the highest mountain in the country at 9300 feet. Maybe I need to wait until I get into the Andes. I’m spoiled by the northern Rockies.

I beat the afternoon rains by about an hour. Karin and Marten told me about a place they stayed called Guancascos so I checked in there. Love the shower and the views are pretty impressive since the hotel sits up on the side of a hill overlooking the town. The restaurant upstairs serves the *best* rollitos de pollo. The order they brought over was so good I ordered second round.

I might stay here 2 days so I can check out the town but riding has been so easy I hate to lose my momentum.

After digging around a little I found a Wordpress plugin called OSM that can read in GPX files and display the map. Now it’s easy to see where the heck I am (Stephanie). Now if I can just figure out a way to show elevation info I’ll be happy.

Update: Wandered around town a little but it’s raining and, although the town is nice enough, there wasn’t much draw to exploring the side streets. I’m pretty bummed about something that happened to another bicycle tourist today too. She was riding (alone) near Limon, Costa Rica when 2 guys came riding up to her, kicked her off her bike into the ditch and then stole her handlebar bag. She ended up losing her camera and passport not to mention her sense of security. Fortunately a guy in a car saw what happened and the little pieces of crap cowards ran off before they could steal her bike too.

[osm_map lat="14.04" long="-88.023" zoom="7" width="400" height="250" gpx_file="http://www.powercycle.net/maps/leg2/082510.gpx"]