Day 2

a beautiful morning greets us when we open the door. we roll out the door to find the parking lot stuffed with cars/trucks/quads, etc. guess we didn't have to worry about the bikes during the night, no one could have gotten to them if they wanted to.

so remember that starting problem that we left last night? well, it was the first order of business this morning. so ye sets to work and i find something to do.



luckily our bikes are the same. his is a 2003, mine a 2004 so the parts are interchangeable. that really helped with diagnosing the problem. he figured out that the clutch-disengagement safety switch had been dislodged by a flying rock or something. once that was fixed we were ready.

while ye was buttoning the bike back up, i busied myself packing our stuff and taking final shots of the room. some things are not to be believed so i captured them as proof.


this is a shot from the bathroom window. notice the view is the cinder block wall of the building next door about 3 inches from the screen.


for some reason, even the better hotels don't have light fixtures, just the bulb themselves. go figure.

once all was button up and packed up, we head south towards bahia san luis gonzaga. the only thing standing between us and it is about 50 miles of the most horrendous road you could ever imagine. but, first things first.

our first stop was pemex, our second was for breakfast. it was getting on about 10 a.m. by this point.



this is a shot toward sea of cortez outside the little restaurant we stopped in for breakfast. We'd eaten here before with pedro. there were two different gringo couples there that morning that we enjoyed talking to. locals are always a good source of information for road conditions. unfortunately, they couldn't give us much on the road from puertecitos to gonzaga bay.











just another shot of the bikes and the restaurant. these are good people. the baño at this particular stop was deluxe. they had flush toilets, toilet paper AND a sink to wash your hands. most do not, i don't want to think about that with regards to my food preparer. . .

this stop also had coca lite (diet coke), a delicacy for me in baja.




remember me mentioning that you would see those neck pillows again? here they are in all their glory. i told ye it closely resembled my body in a swim suit. those are some ugly lumps by anyone's standards. the sight of them made me giggle, hence the picture.

i've got to be honest here, those pillows had flown off more times than we wanted to admit and were becoming a real pain if you know what i mean. that's why they were banished at this point.

after breakfast we mounted up and headed toward puertecitos. we were told that the road was paved but there may be some detours to contend with. actually, the road was paved to the cow patty, a minor off road excursion for about a mile, then back on to pavement for a short while before:






this is looking back on the bay at puertecitos. there is now a gate that extends about 100 yards right across the middle of town that closes from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. apparently the locals are getting a little tired of the late night traffic.






the scenery just does not stop in baja. i'm beginning to think that they have a lock on the "crest the mountain, here's another fabulous view" market.



see that spec on the horizon? yep, that's ye. i saw him from this view many, many, time over the next days. sometimes that spec was so small it wasn't there. :-\ dirt is quite a humbling experience.


when you look at the lower right of this picture, there is a white blob. that blob is actually a car that was pushed, or fell off the road. abandoned vehicles are not an uncommon site, especially along some of the more remote places.


a view from the road. . .






this is a view looking back inland. hard to tell but those rocks on the road were brutal.


bahia san luis gonzaga from the porch of alfonsino's







a little spectator to our meal.















daring to get a little closer









in flight picture, simply amazing!





nothing goes to waste in mexico. . .a few well placed holes and some stitches and that plastic chair is good for another. . . .amount of time. ;-)

we called this our "good enough" tour. seems most things that drew our attention screamed "good enough, we're done."

my o/c head was about ready to explode. :-)





after checking in to alfonsino's for the night we donned our bathing suits fully expecting to swim in the sea of cortez. this is as far as either of us got, the water was a bit more than chilly.




do they get prettier than this? we took a stroll on the beach in the dark, relaxed and watched the sunset. ahhhh, baja.

a group of dirt bikers from the LA area showed up complaining about the terrain on the road from puertocitos. i was congratulated by more than one of them for having tried and completed that ride.

ye stayed and chatted while i went up, showered and hit the sack. it was one long day and we only road about 80 miles. they were the toughest 80 miles i'd ridden to that point.

tomorrow. . .coco's!