Jeremy's Bike Blog

Stats: 18 days traveling, 70 hours of 13 biking days covering 560 miles and 56K feet elevation.

Phineas gave me a ride in my Jeep with my bike pre-boxed.  Check in was easy and all seemed to be going nice and smooth until I noticed, mid flight, that the stub from my checked bike box (which also contained everything I was packing on the trip) looked… random. 

Shit.  Tagging error, and here, this being the 13th time that I’ve flown with my bike, fancying myself savvy and observant, I totally failed to verify that the tag was correct.  I mean, so did the tagging agent, and I was annoyed, but I tried and generally succeeded in not blaming, and focusing on getting things back on track.  Beatriz, an amazing Alaska Air employee went well above and beyond, giving me her personal WhatsApp, keeping me updated as the bike made its way on its 3rd and 4th legs of it’s trip, back into the US (where it would get opened and somewhat shoddily re-taped by US Customs, as it always seems to).

It was my first bit of type 2 fun, making do for 36 hours with only the contents of the fanny-pack that I’d carried on the flight.  Eventually I relented, and bought (pictured) to replace the plastic-y but super versatile for any/all cool or cold weather wind-stopper pants that I’d worn down, and that I had FULLY swamped out.

When Beatriz messaged me this picture of the box that she walked through customs (bless her), my heart sank.  It sank even further when it arrived and I felt how soggy and loose the cardboard was.  I generally remembered to not have too many loose things rattling around, but was definitely more lax than I would have been if I’d known it was going to do 4 legs, 2 trips through MX customs and one trip through US.

Thankfully, all was present, in-tact, and no worse for the wear.  The box was ruined, but I could find another box for the flight home.  It was actually a good excuse to go see the folks at Tia Cleta, a bike shop that I’d stopped in at my last time through, 6 years ago.
Meanwhile, I wrote Alaska Airlines a detailed letter explaining what happened, singing Beatriz’s praises, and offering them the opportunity to take responsibility for replacing the ruined box.  I received a canned response a few days later inviting me to itemize the lost or damaged items. A baggage agent back in the US said that the letter was the best I could hope to do to get Beatriz the recognition deserved.
With all back on track, it felt positively AMAZING, zipping through such a fun, steep town on my newly assembled bike. I tried to ride to a shrine lookout thing and had to lock it up about half way.

The bike I brought was like new, and entirely new to me, save maybe 10 miles of unloaded riding.  It was a Surley Troll that I’d bought used from a guy that lives a few blocks from me in Seattle, who lamented that he’d never made much use of it.  Actually, the first time we met to do the sale, last fall, he got cold feet, to which I said “Great!  You definitely should keep and use this beautiful bike instead of selling it to me”.  A few months later, he decided to sell it after all and got back in touch.

I nearly didn’t get the final essential changes done in time (and was likely going to bring my well-tested bike), but when Kalina tried my old bike and liked the feel of it more, that was all the encouragement I needed to “fix” what made the new bike less comfortable and not quite ready. Mostly it just needed a shorter stem, and racks.
Boy was I glad that I did!  I mean, I’d only put a handful of flat, unloaded miles on it, but what better way to get acquainted than to jump into a multi-week, international trip, right?  Just kittens, that’s generally quite a bad idea.  But whatevs, all in all, the bike turned out to be great.  I was slightly over-packed, thinking it would be cooler at elevation than it turned out to be, and I did end up buying some bullhorns on the trip to turn inwards to allow for more upright riding, but the bike and I got along just great.  For starters, having fat 26″ tires to bump along with is oh soooo much nicer than maxing out at 1.75″ wide on 700c.  This was also my first trip with disc instead of rim brakes, if you can believe it. Disc brakes are just lovely!  Finally, in a stroke of inadvertent genius, at the last minute I grabbed the detachable fanny-pack that’s the lid to my Arc’teryx 95L backpack to use as a handlebar bag.

My last minute new gear purchases for the trip with the new bike were thus limited to:

• Shorter stem
• Teva sandals (haven’t had a good pair of sandals since Peru 4 years ago).
• Rear rack
• Salsa barnacle cages for the front fork
• A 40 deg camping quilt (much lighter than regular sleeping bag).

With the bike now arrived in Puerto Vallarta, assembled, and equipped, my travel experience was transformed in a second way.  Immediately I was no longer yet another, (older,) backpacking gringo. Traveling by bike is a huge cheat to make it easier to meet people. All the other traveling folks I came across were now quite interested in what I had planned.

As always: not much, specifically.

As soon as I landed, well before my bike caught up with me, I’d grabbed a drink with my friend Sava that lives in PV, that I’d met 6 years earlier in Mexico City, and her brother and his friend. I floated the idea of Lake Chapala to her.  She said that it was a lovely place, and that a lot of gringo retirees end up in that area, which (a few days later) helped remind me of a neighbor of 12 years and friend that moved down to Mexico was perhaps somewhere in that area.

That settled it. I’d head east.  There’s a highway that I took last time from PV to Guadalajara, and I didn’t really want to repeat the same ride.  Plus, now I had this fancy new backcountry lovin’ ride.  I found a faint trace of a road on Google Maps that cut much more directly East from PV to Mascota than the highway and decided to start with that.  It had a lot more up/down than the highway, but how hard could it be? Plus, it had this cool adventure camp suspension bridge thingy to check out along the way.

I was equipped to camp, but these days I’d generally just as soon have a bed and shower, especially given that hotels typically cost only $20-30/night.   There didn’t seem to be any hotels between PV and Mascota, and it would probably take me more than a day, I figured.  It turned out to be 2 pretty long and challenging days, during which I spent more time pushing my bike than riding it.  I didn’t know what time the sun set, or what phase the moon was in (for the option of night-riding, if the heat were too much and water too low), so I packed 7 liters of water and generally kept my reserves above 3 liters for those first few days.  My filter came in handy at one point about halfway through, on the morning of the second day when I found my first spring.  Along the route, there was one food stand, and a family farm with a small cafe that would have allowed for much lower water reserves, but I didn’t yet have a sense for the area, or feel comfortable enough asking locals for potable water.  By the end of the trip, I was drinking down my standard 3 liters to half or nothing just as I’d come upon the next opportunity to resupply.  I stopped offering to pay for the refills after I got the sense this offended more than just simply expressing sincere gratitude.  Often I’d ask at a food stand or some place where I was paying and tipping for something else, anyways.

On the second day, I listened to this great podcast episode about Albert Camus and his theory about the myth of Sisyphus.  In summary, the absurdity of the universe’s complete indifference to our dreams and struggles implies that the Sisyphus story is just as easily one of bliss as misery.  Given the absurdity of universal meaninglessness, one of the easiest places one might find true joy is in the brief moment between when one gets a boulder to the top of the hill and when it starts its descent back down.  Hearing and pondering this while literally pushing my boulder of a bicycle up a hill, only to ride down the other side, and then repeat the process on the next hill, with the lyrics and rhythm of Kae Tempest’s “Theme from Becky” running through my head “Some don’t understand, but I’m happiest when struggling”, seemed epiphanic.   The podcast even covered “Type 1 vs Type 2 fun”.  It felt positively amazing to be struggling a struggle of my own choosing and basically in my complete control.  I tried a couple of times on the first day to take advantage of a perfect camping spot, but after about 10 minutes, I’d get restless and continue on.  Eventually, the sun was clearly going to be set in under an hour, and I’d risk having to settle for a less than perfect camping spot.
There was nobody around to ask permission when I camped the first night.  I camped about 10 meters off the road, and saw one motorbike go by just before sundown, and a pickup go by just before sun up.   For the core of the backcountry, I saw about 10 cars total over 24 hours.

I’m fortunate to have not one, not two, but three other units in my 27 unit coop in Seattle occupied by people that also travel by bicycle.  One couple, Brooke and James, were actually already on a much longer long, multi-months trip in Mexico, a good deal further South than I was.  The woman in another unit, who put her 15 pound dog in a handlebar basket and biked herself from Colorado to Seattle when she moved up here, had a subscription to “Adventure Cyclist” magazine that she’d put up for grabs in the front entrance when she was done with it.  I happened upon the latest copy to show up on my way to load my bike into my Jeep, and on my flight down read an article written by some other international bike tourers about being mindful and respectful of the fact that you’re a visitor when traveling, and that even if the land is public, that makes it public property of a nation to which you’re a visitor.  It struck a chord, so this trip I resolved to make more of a point of asking permission at every opportunity, and putting much more emphasis on the hypothetical implications of opening a closed gate, relative to having to turn back and lose “progress” towards a chosen destination.  Thankfully I never ended up needing to seriously consider opening or circumventing a closed gate in connecting faint lines on Google maps (as I had to not infrequently last time around), and only had to double back on maybe 15 minutes riding on one or two occasions.  Also, perhaps Google Maps has improved in this regard, too, over the last four years.

Speaking of… Tech talk:  For this trip, I recorded almost all my riding GPS with AllTrails.  It’s exports of the GPX routes from AllTrails, imported into gpx.studio that’s shown at the top of this post. I had a backup phone, with both phones having Google Maps offline maps of the region, but no paper maps, as always.  When online, Google Maps bicycling directions will give an elevation profile that can be checked, say, at every single pocket of shade to check one’s progress up the current hill.  But be careful not to back out of the route once you’re offline, or you never get it back.  All told, I was still rolling fairly low-tech.
I also had GPX Viewer Pro and CalTopo installed, but didn’t manage to find a way to get them to give me routes with elevation profiles while offline, so they didn’t really offer any additional functionality. I brought a lighter power pack than my standard one, which seemed to have about 2 complete charges, which was more than enough, though in these conditions, and with improvements since I last tried one, a small solar panel might have given me effectively unlimited power for my phone and 360 camera.  Speaking of 360 cameras, I keep trying to love Google Street View, but it seems it has yet to love me back.  It’s pretty hard to get it all working, and I got kinda bored of doing all the necessary steps, but I uploaded some 360 photos from my route, which can be seen in my “Photo contributions to Google Maps“.  I still hold out some hope that there’s a (possibly yet-to-be-created, possibly by me) app that will make the route, of a multi-day, international bike trip like this both easy and fun to both capture and consume.  IMO AllTrails is 3 out of 5 stars on the capture front, and TBD on the consumer front. Street View and the 360 camera also have potential to contribute here as well.

End tech talk.

As I bombed down my last major hill to the valley in which Mascota was waiting, with lovely hotel, plaza, people, and food, I knew I’d never go back to bike touring with my old bike again.  There are too many amazing, unpaved roads and trails in the world to settle for a frame that maxes out at 1.75″ tires.  Besides, it’s only a matter of time until the divot worn into the chain-stay by slightly too large back tires leads to a break in my old frame for a second time, and I promised myself when Morgan welded my frame back together after the first break (at dropout), that that would also be the last frame repair.

Mascota was the first town in 2 days, and it was delightful.  I took my time in the morning, tried to finish the namesake drink of a local cafe and called my friend and former neighbor Wendy and confirmed that she did in fact live in the town of Chapala and would be happy to host me.

Kalina was caught a bit off guard with me going offline for about 36 hours and was starting to get worried, so I went ahead and started sharing my location with her, Wendy, and a number of friends that I’d be happy to check out my whereabouts while on the road.  I think this too would be part of the ideal adventure capture/sharing app, near-real time route updating (not just location sharing) by people when they’re traveling.   I actually have lots of thoughts about how to do this well in general (pondered with my abundant time for thought plodding along on my bike), but won’t digress into that here. 

By the time I got to Volcanes, the second town I’d hotel in, I’d regained enough confidence in my Spanish to up my engagement with other people.  I asked around to find the best hotel in town, and also to find the favorite places to eat.  I felt like this was the point at which I’d hit my rhythm.  Taking my time during the relatively cool morning turned out to be less ideal than using the coolness of morning to get some miles in.  Trying to find great food to eat ‘cena’ after a post shower nap and letting the sun set and the air cool, turns out to be a lot easier than before sun down.

These small towns clearly don’t see tourists very often.  It’s also clearly the case that engagement/acknowledgement of passers by goes up inversely to population density.  I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable since I last traveled like this in engaging on some level with most everyone I pass, once out of population centers and in more remote areas. Generally, the more remote the area, the more I’d invite engagement and conversation, while also trying to gauge if the person would just as soon not be bothered.

I’ll forego a day-by-day accounting of the 13 days that were primarily riding. I basically woke up, ate, biked, rested and explored towns and countryside and went back to sleep.  It was a beautiful rhythm.  The night before I arrived at Wendy’s, I was so excited for the last day before a likely break of a few days that I could hardly get to sleep in the waterpark campground I’d found for the night.

I had dozens of endearing encounters.  About half of them were with bi-nationals that had spent time in the states and knew more English than I know Spanish.  I’ve maintained contact with a couple of them, one a couple that lives in LA but come home to a town near the one in which we met, another a motorcyclist that bought me lunch and may stop through on his way to Alaska.

I met a family with a deaf son whose father translated from ASL into Spanish.  I complimented his bike and he jokingly offered to trade with me.  Several people stopped to offer help, only to light up and totally “get it” when I laughingly explained that I was happy to be struggling.  A 13 year old girl offered me help with total confidence and in perfect English in a popsicle transaction.  When I volunteered that I was from Seattle, she said that she lived half time in Quincy, WA.  I also got to spend some time with Sava (the woman who lives in PV) and her mom (who I’d met when they came to Seattle in 2016), on their newly acquired land on my last day before getting back to PV.

Getting to see Wendy and how well she’s settled into, and formed a community, in her new life in Chapala was amazing.  She’s relatively young for a retiree, but happily in the last home she’ll likely ever have, driving the last car she’ll likely ever own, accompanied by the last dog she’ll likely ever adopt.  She’s learned more Spanish than I, or many of the expatriate retirees living down there, and continuing to learn more.  She has a bevy of local women (mostly, some men) about her age that she meets for morning dog walks, and another bevy in Seattle to whom she instructs yoga for income.  Re: dating, she refers to the adage: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd”.  I’d actually only hung out with her a small handful of times one-on-one when we were neighbors all those years. Being her guest for 3 nights allowed us to get to know each other a lot better, which was delightful.

Some highlights on the way back were getting down to the coast at a couple of spots, one of them very remote, where I asked some car-campers if they thought it was alright to camp on a beach. They said “sure!”, and I walked my bike about half a mile down the beach, watched and watercolor-painted a picture perfect sunset, then drifted off to blissful sleep.  I woke up to what I could swear was a wave of tidy-bowl blue bioluminescence, but it didn’t seem to repeat, so maybe my eyes were playing tricks.

I enjoyed a couple of volleyball games in the town square of Villa Purificacion, where I was the only foreigner.  It was actually sitting on the ledge with neither back support nor handlebars where I overexerted my back, mid-back, resulting in slight spasms over the next couple of days.  It was OK, I could still push my bike when needed, and ride without noticing any difference, I just needed to be ginger with it when twisting, rolling over while lying down, or other things which were fine to do more gingerly for a few days.  I also tweaked my lower back with the abundance of pushing over the first two days.  Some Yin style yoga …which I’d also read about in my found copy of Adventure Cycling… took care of that before it got bad at all.

The last day of real riding was back up to 2000 ft from the sea-level beach mentioned above. With pushing my bike through fairly soft sand to connect back up to the road in the morning, the overwhelming heat of the day, and the up and down, it was as big a day as any.  I’d long since taken to starting my evening showers with clothes on, caked in dirt and sweat as they were.  This evening, in El Tuito’s hotel of choice, I was delighted to see a big bathroom with the standard open concept shower, and my salt-sea-spray and dirt covered bike joined me for that evening’s shower.  Following that, plus a lube of the chain with some sunscreen, the horrible noises my chain was making by that point went away for the remainder of my trip.

The last two days were spent back in Puerto Vallarta, mostly just getting my COVID test, sourcing a box, figuring out how best to get box and bike to airport from the last night’s hotel, and checking out the area around the airport, including federal public beach very difficult to exit from owing to massive resorts, and a marina full of rich gringos and clones of Senor Frogs serving very americanized, but still delicious, fish tacos. If I do it again, I think I’ll get my bike box from the Velo shop, and get back to the staging hotel taking advantage of that public land buffer. The highways around the airport are very hectic.