Long day on the 15D

December 20, 2018

Villa Union to Ojo de Agua de Palmillas

It was a bit of a surprise to see how keen the boys were to get away from the hotel, all of them packing up their bikes while I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Dea and I don't tend to leave hotels before checkout time if we can help it, but seeing the guys keen to leave we got ourselves ready and, despite me having a flat tyre to fix, we were all on the road by ten.

We had two route options, the 15 or the 15D. I knew from cycling in Mexico before that the 15D would be a highway with a shoulder, where cycling was not technically legal, while the 15 would be a normal, narrow road, probably without a shoulder, and therefore probably more dangerous. So we wanted to try our luck on the 15D, but we hadn't looked properly at the map, and the junction where we thought we could get on wasn't a junction at all, just a bridge over the 15D. We had no idea how we could get onto our road of choice, until Ciaran piped up with a suggestion to follow a not-very-promising little track into the trees. We had no better ideas, so we did so, and I think we were all very surprised when Ciaran's magic path brought us out onto the highway as we'd hoped.

Despite the signs we were passed by many police cars that were not at all interested in us, and we were even waved straight through a toll booth. All day we rode on this highway, and us such I have very little of interest to tell you about. The road itself made for fast progress, although the shoulder wasn't as reassuring as it might have been, given that it was used all the time as a slow lane by trucks (that weren't going that slow). Aside from that, the road was busy and noisy and not much fun.

As you can see from the traffic coming the other way, a lot of stuff just drove in the shoulder.

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly at the end of it, when we pulled off the highway into a small town to look for somewhere to camp. After a whole day of noise and trucks, it felt like bliss to roll into a slice of the real Mexico, with people waving, people on bicycles, people on horses, dogs and chickens everywhere. It was really so great. Dea and I chatted for a while with some kids that said hello, and it was really such a nice way to end the day.

We were all a bit tired and unsure of where we could sleep, when Tom, as he so often did, stepped up and went and asked in a restaurant if we could camp. Soon we were settling in to a yard of barking dogs and crowing roosters, a real authentic Mexican camping experience.

The woman owner of the restaurant collecting water from a deep well.

We had a great dinner together in the restaurant, with a long debate as to how many people it is possible to fit on a bicycle, and whether or not it would be possible to ride a bike with one person standing on each pedal. Despite having enough people to test both, unfortunately no one was willing to donate their bicycle to the experiments and we had to settle for our hypothetical debates. Another highlight of the evening came when Tom put forth an improvement to the common phrase "the cats out of the bag" by first suggesting "it's hard to get the cat out of the bag" and then further improving it to "it's hard to get the cat into the bag, and it's hard to get the cat out of the bag."
"What does that mean though?" Ciaran asked, "because the cat out of the bag means like a secret's revealed."
"It doesn't mean anything, it just means it's hard to get the cat into the bag, and hard to get the cat out of the bag."

Today's ride: 94 km (58 miles)
Total: 1,627 km (1,010 miles)

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