wed. feb. 25th....rachel's point of view

…. You have to wait for Glen’s posting for the other opinion about the same day……

Another hot day in the sun. 11am, and we were hitting the road from just south of Loreto on our way to La Parisma and back up towards the highway where we’d meet Clare in Rosarito. The first 8 miles turned out to be paved. Good news for me, not so much for Glen. Then we met construction….and a group of tourists taking photos of it. Not so sure about that one! Then the trail became a windy, rocky dirt road thru the mtns. Windy dirt is still fairly slow going for me, but at least it was still fun road, and had beautiful views.

We arrived at the mission town of Comondu, where we took a small break to look at a beautiful stone church, and where I had a small conversation with an 80+yr old couple who were “very poor and can’t work any more because we’re too old.”. it made me smile.

The smile quickly faded when the trail became a track of large loose boulders, which kicked my bike around like a “bucking bronco” (as russ put it). This became VERY exhausting, VERY quickly. My pace slowed to a crawl as I tried to pick my way thru these rocks while trying VERY hard to keep rubber side down, at some points literally walking my bike! (while sitting on it). At one point a rock bucked my bike right off the trail and in a desperate attempt to keep the bike running and moving forward I kept barreling along the ‘shoulder’ and hopping off of several large rocks before finally spilling it again. This time the only damage was a peg down my boot, trapping one leg for a bit while my other leg was laying on top of the engine and burning thru the pants. After a wee struggle to get the bike started again, I continued to creep forward with my trusty “bounty….the quicker picker upper” (russ) following behind.

Blissfully, we arrived in the beautiful oasis towns of San Isidro and La Parisma. The locals either laughed at us, or just stared at me when I asked them a question, and all the children wanted to see a wheelie. We gased up, and after questioning the locals, I was prepared for another 60km of ‘mas o menos’ the same kind of road. Thankfully, they were wrong, and we had 20 miles of wonderful grated track where I could actually maintain some sort of speed. Ironically, this stretch of road appeared as the worst stretch on the map. Wrong again. The last 20 miles were a mix of straight stretches of flat grated road, windy rocky patches and beautiful valley vistas…… and the whole time, I was counted down the miles.

We managed to make it out onto asphalt, find Clare and get to a campsite all before the sun went down. Ask Glen about how import that was! And for the second nite in a row, I parked my tent in front of the water on a beach and woke to dolphins dancing in the bay. (sorry mom!)