Rebecca and I have been keeping busy here in Oaxaca, tagging along with our friend and host Alex to a number of pre-Muertos events. In spite of our busy social calendar :) , I did take a few moments to edit this short video for our Facebook Page. The clip may seem familiar as it's a shortened, silent version of this one and is made up entirely of footage from the Baja Divide. Looking back, I see that we've recorded…
Oaxaca City now holds the record for being the place that we have remained stationary for the longest time on our cycle tour, a bit more than a week. While the city itself is awesome, our extended stay is the result of having an exceptionally forgiving host, and the fact that the Dia de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — celebration was on the horizon. We have more amazing memories from Oaxaca than we can count and were fortunate enough to…
It's often stated that a sailor's plans are written in the sand at low tide, meaning that all plans are subject to change. While a cyclist may not be at the mercy of Mother Nature in quite the same way as a sailor, we've learned that keeping our plans flexible is a key to happiness. For example, just minutes before saying goodbye to our friend Alex in Oaxaca, he looked over our route and pointed out that a road which,…
I mentioned in our last post that riding into a headwind was like climbing an invisible mountain. During our last few days riding from Tapanatepec to San Cristóbal, we experienced that in spades. But not only did we have invisible, headwind-induced mountains to climb, we had some real ones to contend with too. In fact, we knocked off our biggest climb to date. We had a good night's rest in Tapanatepec but before bedding down for the night, we had what…
Having had more than our fill of busy highway riding during the last stretch of our journey, we were more determined than ever to find an out-of-the-way track before it was time to say "So long, Mexico." As luck would have it, our friends Mark and Hana had already done all the complicated work by plotting a largely back-road route from San Cristobal to the border. We knew that we could just follow in their tire tracks (or GPS track…
Having spent so long in Mexico, — just shy of 6 months — it seems strange to now be riding through Guatemala, an entirely different country. It may have been even more surreal had we simply ridden across some arbitrary line in the sand as we did when we crossed from the United States to Mexico. As it was, the river we crossed to arrive in Guatemala made the country change infinitely more defined, even though it was only a…