I'm finally getting a chance to get this Trip Report underway.  I started out almost exactly one week ago, and am now in Creel, Mexico after travelling 1996 miles.  Quite a lot considering i'd ridden 3000 miles total before this trip. 

I started out on Monday after getting my box of spare parts, and raced the weather to the Sierra trying to get to Mammoth by dark.  I was close, the sun had just set, lighting up the local thunderstorms to some intense shades of purple and red.  I stayed at the Davison St Guest House, by for the best deal in town, and woke up to Mammoth Mtn covered with snow which started a few hundred feet above the guest house. 

The bike was hard to start in the cold and at 8000', but fortunately there was a motocycle expert at the guest house which helped get it going and gave me advice on how to deal with cold starts at high altitudes.  I spent Tuesday riding through Death Valley to Las Vegas, it was hot in the valleys and cold on the mountains in between, and then rode on Wednesday from Las Vegas to Tucson, AZ where I met up with Dick and Eric. 

We spent Thursday getting last minute items like insurance for Mexico, and rode a couple hours down to the border town of Douglas.  On Friday morning we rode across the border, starting early just in case it took a long time.  What a shock, however!  We get to the border station and there is a little unmanned booth and a green light on which is written 'passe', so we go through, then there are a couple uniformed officials at the customs area, but they display absolutely no interest in us, so we just ride right in.  And then we ride a couple hundred kilometers towards Nuevo Cassas Grande, when we come across a checkpoint where they want to see our permits.  Permits?  Oops, so we backtrack to a different border station where we spend several hours going through the Red Tape Machine, which was more like what we originally expected. 

We still made it to Nuevo Cassas Grande, but slightly after sunset.  At the motel we found they recomended a restaurant across the street, so we went out for our first Mexican meal.  It was a sushi ´place.  And nothing else was close.  So our first Mexican meal was sushi - and it was delicious. 

The owner of the place recomended going to Cascada de Basaseachi when she found out we were going to Creel, so we checked that out yesterday.  It is the highest year-round waterfall in Mexico, and was quite spectacular.  We didn't do the 5 hour hike to the base of it and back since we wanted to get on to Creel, but it was well worth the stop just to see the terrain and the waterfall from the top. 

The ride to Creel was mostly dirt road, 60 miles of it, and was my first real experience riding the motorcycle off the pavement.  It was scary at first but I got used to it quickly.  The worst part is loose pebbly gravel in between the tire tracks, the bike wants to wander.  When I asked for dirt riding advice Dick told me that the bike 'wants to stay up', and I made this my mantra.  After meditating on this for a while it occured to me that the two wheels work as gyroscopes and that indeed the bike does not want to fall to either side.  We arrived at Creel just as the sun hit the horizon, later than expected because Eric had a flat tire, it took 1 hour and 8 minutes to fix.

Creel is a cool little town.  Lots of tourists and lots of mountain biking.  Eric and I almost rented mountain bikes to join up with these other guys on a guided ride to a hot spring.  However the guide showed up late, said he had other commitments, and then another guide showed up with a big group of people and they were going to go somewhere else.  I declined and came here to the internet cafe instead, the first one I've seen, so these blog entries might end up being kind of rare.  The keyboard is weird,  to get an @ sign you have to push the Alt key and hold it down while pushing the 6 then the 4 on the numeric keypad.  Real intuitive. 

Tomorrow we are going to ride down into Copper Canyon to a town at the bottom who's name I{ve forgotten, starts with a B, then maybe up a road out the other side if it doesn}t prove too difficult.  see these { signs i keep putting in instead of apostraphes?  it's the keyboard.

Okay, well that's it for Episode One of the travels of the Triumvirate of Steel, stay tuned for future reports, and I{m going to try to insert some photos here, if I can!
 

Monday October 31, 2005 - 10:31am (PST)