PowerCycle

06/27 Worst day ever. Started off very early with heavy rain all night. Barely got any sleep (loud in tent). Next up were fire ants which chewed merrily on my feet while I was packing my gear in the rain. Finally on the road I hit a water-filled pothole and destroyed my front rack. Half an hour after that my rear tire went flat. Had it filled 90% of the way and it went flat again. Got a decent sunburn. Found a hotel in town, opened my toiletry bag and discovered that the tube of BenGay had ruptured and was all over everything. Jumped in the shower and was electrocuted by the shower head.

The funny thing about today was I had a feeling this morning that it would be a really bad day. I should have stayed put. This will be hard to believe but I didn’t swear or throw anything all day.

The front rack is a major, major problem. The bottom half bent under the weight of the pannier when I slammed down into the pothole. It’s actually a miracle that only one spoke was broken. Glad there are 35 more. I spent the next hour taking off the front fender and trying to straighten the rack back out. Of course bending medal that’s already damaged usually makes it more damaged. Now one of the weight-bearing bars is almost ripped right in half. Getting someone to weld it might work but I’m only going to try that as a last resort. The one bar isn’t the only one that’s damaged. I took almost everything out of the pannier and managed to make it here without it failing completely. There’s no way I can ride off-pavement and that’s another problem because the next part of my route after Coban tomorrow was supposed to be gravel. I’m also down a front fender which makes riding in the rain a mess.

I’m hoping that Coban has some sort of bike shop that could at least order me a new rack and fix the spoke. If it doesn’t I could probably fix the spoke but I’d have to order the rack from the States which would cost a fortune.

The flat tire sucked because now I’m down to 2 spare tubes and it’s harder than I thought to find ones with Presta valves. The one that went bad was the last from a batch of 3 I bought in Mazatlan. All three ended up wearing out at the inner seam.

Camped out last night in the back yard of the people that run the local restaurant. The lady spoke a little English which made things a little easier (even though I could have gotten through it in Spanish). She even offered to let me stay thanks to the weather but I set off to see how bad of a day I could have. It ended up not raining the rest of the day until literally 10 seconds after I got to the motel.

Mega hills today. One of them was the steepest I’ve ridden up on any major road. Traffic was light so I rode up it side-to-side and would have made it all the way except for one truck that messed it up for me.

Rode through some amazing scenery over the last 2 days. There are some beautiful national parks in Guatemala and I was lucky enough to pass through one of them–Ceibal. That place had the biggest trees and ferns I’ve ever seen. The mountain range called Sierra Chinaja was equally impressive. The mountains aren’t extremely high but they are entirely tree-covered and rise up from the jungle like huge pillars.

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Pictures are here. Once again the site breaks when I try to include them in the post. Argh.

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.

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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.

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02/23 Today was perfect. Great weather, nice roads and beautiful scenery. I’m fighting off a saddle sore so I kept the miles down a little. Lowering the seat back down helped but now I’ll have to watch my knees because they get sore when the seat is too low. It’s not easy.

When I arrived in Cuautla is was about 3pm so I found a motel and took a taxi over to the Walmart. I was hoping they’d have a better selection of cameras. They did but the one I wanted wasn’t there. There was an Office Depot next door but they didn’t have very many cameras. I need a Best Buy but I don’t think there’ll be one until Oaxaca, if there’s even one there.

Across the street there’s a restaurant called California Buffet so I headed over for dinner. For US $10 you get the dinner/salad/dessert buffet and all the beer (Corona) you can handle. What a deal.

I decided to stick to my original plans and skip dropping down to Acapulco. It’s a lot warmer now and once I get past Oaxaca I’ll be in lower elevations anyway.

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