For the day and a half we're in El Rosario, Mama Espinoza's is as busy as it will get all year.  The Baja 1000 has come to town, as it does every year. This family-run restaurant has been at the heart of it since 1967, when the first organized race saw motorcycles and buggies flying across some of the nastiest terrain geology can dish out.  Now, the walls of Mama Espinoza's are covered in signed photographs - men on dirt bikes flying through the air in front of cacti and stony mountains, trucks kicking up huge plumes of dust - maps, and race memorabilia.  When we stop in for dinner the tables are packed with these same men.  Kelly and I wait a few minutes for a table to open, and order Pacifico.  The place hums with the nervous energy of men who've waited all year and finally have a suitable outlet for their passion.  Some drink Margaritas or Red Bull in silence, others check their phones and tablets, calling out times and distances.  Next to us, a group of six has just sat down and ordered some lobster burritos, when one checks his phone.  "Shit!  He's at mile 370, just through check 3, cancel the order we gotta get moving."  A minute later they're replaced by another group of men in dirty jeans and driving suits.

Riding into El Rosario, most of the traffic had been race traffic: Ford Raptor after Ford Raptor, beds packed with knobby tires and long-spouted containers of high-octane fuel, paraded to the pits at Cataviña.  Trophy trucks and buggies, nothing but tubing, suspension, and plastic cladding encasing obscene engines were interspersed throughout.  The trophy trucks slowed to pass us and when they tapped the gas on the other side it sounded like the earth was opening up.  The power difference between our chosen modes of transport was startling.   Kelly's stomach had been revolting all day, and though we had rested the day before, we decided to take a sick day in El Rosario, the last outpost before the 300 kilometer expanse of the Baja desert.

The next morning, after a restful night in our modest motel across the sandy parking lot, we head back to Mama's for breakfast.  We start to sip our Nescafe when a couple more Ford's pull into the parking lot.  Out pops a team we'd met in San Quintin, running the race's only stock (unmodified from the dealer, except for the addition of a roll cage, harnesses, and a skid plate).   They're goal isn't a time, but simply to finish.  They're part of a crew of 12 support trucks, 3 camera cars, and one helicopter, all funded by Ford to generate some press for a brand new truck.  They'd been chipper and excited when we'd met them at 7am in San Quintin but now, walking through the door at Mama Espinoza's, they look like the walking dead.  They sit down to chat and we find out they haven't slept since we saw them, having spent the night digging their support truck out of a mud hole at the bottom of a canyon.  The mud was midway up the doors and it took them all night, but the race truck is doing well so they're in good spirits.  "Are you going to finish?" Kelly asks.

"Yes," says Dustin, a young guy, with a thin, gallic face, who works for Ford and helped to build the truck.

Jason, hefty and freckled, shoots him a dirty look.  "Why the hell did you just say that?" he asks.

"Yeah, yeah.  You were thinking the same thing.  Don't be so superstitious," Dustin responds.  One of the team's drivers, still clad in his dusty canvas jumper, pulls back the tablecloth and raps the wood underneath.  Jason follows suit.

"What I should have said is that our truck is doing really well right now," Dustin modifies.  Jason and the driver nod their approval.

Kelly understands the superstition well.  Road conditions, upcoming topography, wind, weather, and traffic are all things she'd prefer not be jinxed by an offhand comment.   As we prepare to head into an unknown desert, Kelly's as nervous as she has been before any leg of the trip.  When we leave the next morning, she'll have 20 liters of water strapped to the top of the trailer.  The when's and how's of resupplying and sleeping in the desert are hearsay at this point and she wants to be prepared for the worst case scenario.  I'm more optimistic but I try to keep that to myself.

What we do know when we leave El Rosario is that we'll have to climb from close to sea level up to 2,000 feet over the first 22 miles and then continue through a landscape that one touring blog described as "endlessly hilly."  I'm still not sure how to read touring bicyclists' terrain descriptions (they often seem more a reflection of the riders psychological state while riding through a segment than an objective reflection of the topography) but I'm pretty sure that "endlessly hilly" is going to be a pain in the ass, however the rider was feeling.

When we leave, and the road turns inland, we're suddenly greeted by a bright green valley, with some of the happiest cow's in Baja munching on a field of grass.   The oasis disappears as soon as we start climbing, up an immediately steep slope that's to set the tone for the rest of the day - sometimes brutal, sometimes gradual, but climbing, always climbing, the descents too short for the muscles to breath.  But there's always beauty to take my mind off the grind.  Surrounded by endless cacti and rings of rolling hills giving way to sharp peaks in the background, a stark and wide open sky.  Even Kelly, who's been grumbling about the lack of greenery since Oregon, started muttering, "Jesus, that's pretty," as we wound our way into the desert.  

After 29 miles, we came across the first sign of civilization since leaving El Rosario, a ramschakle restaraunt/truck stop that consisted of a simple stone house surrounded by a few weathered out-buildings, rusting vehicles, and wind-blown trash.  Kelly goes in to inquire about camping in the area and the family inside says sure, camp wherever you like, motioning to the property behind the house.  A middle-aged man with a dark face and a toothy smile comes out of the house to investigate.  "Are you tired?" he asks.

"Yes, we left at 6am," I say.  

He nods.

"Long distances here," I say.

"Yes," He says, and walks towards an out-building.  A few small dogs and two kittens follow at his feet.

We set up camp behind the house.  Kelly rests her bike against the bald, cracked tires of some rusting heavy equipment and we clear some broken glass to set up the tent.  The ground is too hard to set stakes, so we use rocks to anchor against the mountain wind.  Two skinny mutts  come searching for food scraps and attention and Kelly gives them both.  When I pee in the dirt, the littlest one, an ugly, daschund mongrel, comes and marks over my scent.  He trots back to Kelly.

When camp's set up we head back to the restaurant for an early dinner.  The whole family's still inside, hanging out as they must everyday.  It's dark and stony, like a cave, but our eyes soon adjust to the light.  The kitchen is run by three good-looking, well-fed women who whip up some of the best food we've had in Mexico so far.  A little-boy who flashes us mischievous grins does laps around our table on his three-wheeler as we wait for food, crashing into the door when he gets bored.   I'd been nervous about camping in the desert, vestiges of fear-mongering media and vague blog-mentions of random robbery and violence.  But the reality of a family trying to sell enough food and coffee to subsist in the desert quickly makes my nervousness seem rather silly and xenophobic. The little-boy joins us at the table and starts crashing his toy bus into the salt and salsa bottles.

The next day we awake to roosters at 4am, drink coffe and make peanut butter and banana sandwiches for breakfast in the tent before the sun is up.  We're back on the road shortly after sunrise.  The day is hard, but not as bad, physically, as the previous, but it's mentally draining.  For the first 30 miles we ride up and down a procession of low hills.  "That's 7," Kelly says after riding up the seventh hill in the first 2 miles.

"Stop that," I say.  "It'll make you crazy."  The landscape is cacti and thornbrush, dirt pullouts, and bad asphalt, set on repeat.  It feels like we're spinning in a hamster wheel.  Counting or not, movement without progress will make you mad.  We stop for a snack with some 15 miles to go before Cataviña.  We're both done with the day, done with riding.  A Subaru that'd just passed us flips around and comes back to chat.  "Hey!  I saw you guys on the road, and I was like wow, look at these guys!  I was a mechanic in Colorado Springs for the U.S. cycling team.  Name's Renee, I live up in Orange County, come down here a lot though, was born in Mexico City..." he goes on.  Before long he's pulled out a homemade remote-controlled quadricopter that he's mounted a GoPro camera on.  "Okay, you guys get riding, I'm gonna take some shots."  The device whizzes into the air. "You guys have fun, until next time!" he says as he fiddles with the joysticks.

We start pedaling and the device is swooping in front of us like a Predator Drone about to take out some Afgan civilians.  Within a kilometer the landscape changes.  Huge boulders start popping up amidst the cacti and pretty soon it's a boulderer's paradise, huge piles of rock, some 150ft high litter the sides of the road, as far as the eye can see.  Suddenly we're awake and engaged, riding through a world like nothing either of us have ever seen before. It puts a smile on my face and Cataviña doesn't seem so far away.

The next 3 days go by in a blur.  We ride 66 miles through the hills, then 61.  The desert is wide open and we want to get through it.  By the time we start our last day  before Guerrero Negro both Kelly and I are so tired we can barely drink our coffee.  The last day is short and easy, only 23 miles of flat riding.  My body has become so used to the rhythm of pedaling that I catch myself trying to doze off at 11mph.  I spray myself with cold water and we keep riding.

A selection of advice we received about Mexico, unsolicited from random people before leaving the U.S. (with full consideration that these were mostly well-intentioned folks, with an interest in our safety):

"I've spent a lot of time down there, and it's frightening.  You need to be careful." (shakes head with look of grave, vague reminiscence.


"Those drivers down there are crazy!"


"Some places are fine, but Tijuana is one of the worst.  You need to make sure you plan your route really well."


"They will kill you!"


"Be careful!"



Now, most of these came from a place of genuine concern, but weren't particularly helpful.  The "Be careful!" admonition is one that immediately causes both Schwan and my hair to bristle and we'll immediately switch off the listening part of our brains.  Oh I should be careful? I was going to play chicken with Mexican petrol trucks and search for blow in moonless alleys, but now that you mentioned it maybe I will think about being careful.




It's now been a week since crossing over to "down there" and surprise, surprise, Northern Baja from Tijuana to San Quintin hasn't been land of narcos, violent glue-sniffing robbers, and sociopathic drivers that advice would have led us to believe.  Yes, things have been a little more hectic in Mexico but that's how it goes in most of the world.

Most of our difficulties since crossing into Mexico have been environmental and physiological.    Once we got our tourist visas and started getting back onto our bikes, it felt like the border patrol had actually been spending their money on an invisible force field to keep the heat from fouling San Diego's temperate image.  9am and I was already spraying myself down.  Not good, I thought.  The other problem was that upon turning on our Garmin, I found that city maps of North America had disappeared.  No signs, no map, let's start riding and hope we can find the right highway.  Fortunately, stress was able to pry free a little of the Spanish that's been rusting in the back of my brain since I left El Salvador nine years ago.  After asking some attendants at a Pemex station - who gave looks of amused disbelief that we were looking to ride Highway 1 out of town - braving a highway overpass, consulting our very vague GPS, turning around, asking a guy in a Taco truck (who gave the same look), and turning around again, we eventual found the free highway (the ubiquitously signed toll road doesn't allow bikes) heading to Rosarito. Traffic was heavy, it was hot, and my blood pressure went to shit, but eventually we made it up the 6-mile climb out of town.  From there, brown hills spotted with large housing developments roll down to the Pacific.  An easy descent later and we were already in Rosarito.  By 2pm we were lounging by the pool of a little beachside hotel. 




Riding the stretch from Rosarito to Ensenada felt like an extension of California's Highway 1, dry rolling hills and headlands, the road winding above crashing surf and crystalline water.  We were able to put in 52 miles without terrible difficulty.

It wasn't until the highway cuts inland, away from the coastal breezes and into the Sierra de San Pedro Martira that things started to get hard.  First it was the hills, which had been steep but short since leaving the Big Sur area, but now kept getting bigger and bigger until they turned into mountains.  Then came the heat.  It behaves different in these parts.  None of the steady building until a 5pm high like in Oregon summers.  Here, the early mornings are cool, but there's a time around 8am, when the sun gets high enough, that the day's heat is released into the atmosphere and the temp can jump 15-20 degrees in as many minutes.  By 9am it's almost as hot as it's going to get.  The morning's are blazing, but the heat starts breaking around 1pm steadily descends for the rest of the afternoon.   Not that we knew any of this until we got into it.

My personal low-point of the entire trip so far came 2 days ago.  We'd spent our first night in a Mexican campground (similar to private U.S. campgrounds, but with roosters!) and were moving slowly in the morning.  Kelly and her Groucho-Marx looking cat-friend worried about food and I slowly packed up the tent.  We didn't get on the road until almost 9am and it was already in the 80's.  As soon as we started pedaling I didn't feel great, but usually it takes a little while to get into a rhythm. As we started climbing I couldn't find that rhythm.  Something was off, whether dehydration, not getting enough calories to recover from the previous day's ride, blood pressure, or a combination of all three I can't be sure.  On the rather gradual slope I had to shift into my lowest gear and crawl up.  "What's wrong?" Kelly asked as she waited for me at a shaded shoulder. "It's not near as steep as yesterday, you should be crushing this." I didn't know, so I kept drinking water and had some food. In civilized life, it's pretty easy to get through the day if you're a bit dehydrated or you haven't eaten right. You might feel a bit sluggish. But when you're pedaling for 5+ hours day, the body has a tendency to make its needs very apparent. Subtlety is not in it's best interest.

So my body yelled at me and I yelled back and eventually Kelly and I made it to the top of the pass at 1,600 feet. It always feels good getting to the top of whatever you've been climbing, for you get to enjoy the descent. And a helluva descent it was, a fast open road that sped us past hardy scrubland and dusty arroyos. The problem was that as soon as we dropped onto the other side of the mountain the temp jumped into the low 90's and kept climbing as we descended. Kelly likened the descent to driving in an old car in the summer and having to blast the heat to keep the radiator from overheating. I knew I was going to have issues when I saw my spedo at 40mph and I still wasn't cooling off. As soon as the road started rolling and I had to work, I was cooked.  My struggles only prolonged both mine and Kelly's time in the blazing sun, though Kelly was as patient as a sweating Schwan can be. By the we pulled into San Vicente at 1pm, Kelly's black helmet straps were caked white with salt. We'd only done 24 miles and I couldn't do anymore. In that heat, all the niggling doubts about whether this trip is physically possible for me started to come to the forefront and we almost hoped on a bus to San Quintin to get back down to the coast. But after some rest, food, and a few dousings of ice-cold water, we decided to just find a room where we were and see if tomorrow went better.

We found a room, a market, and met some of the local kids who wander the dusty side-lanes of town on their BMX bikes. By the time we'd bought some food to cook dinner, the sun was setting over the mountains. They cut sharply into angry red sky that slowly deepened to purple. The kids were racing after passing Baja 1000 trucks, pleading for stickers. People smiled when we passed because not many people stop in San Vicente unless they have to.

The next morning we were up at 4am and on our bikes heading for a quick coffee at 6am. The sun hadn't yet peeked over the hills and already the town was bustling. Everyone going to work, or already working, and we didn't feel so special for getting such an early start. That day we climbed in the early morning sun, bumped over miles of stony construction zones, and made it out of the inland sauna before worst of the heat arrived. Both our bodies felt good so we kept on riding, over hills and through dusty valley's, out of the mountains and into agricultural land. Kelly towing another 30-40lbs of water weight in addition to her normal road. 69 miles in 85 degree heat towards the promise of an air-conditioned room for Kelly's birthday. It's amazing what your body can do when you decide to try again.

We made it to Mexico!! We couldn't fit through the turn-style on the pedestrian crossing though this is where we were told to go. The guards couldn't open the gate next to the turnstyles, so we were told to go on the highway with the cars. We ended up riding on I-5 through the maze of cars to get to customs. We were not-so-kindly greeted by an official wanting to know why we were there. After some explanation (thank goodness he spoke English), he was nice and actually walked us across the border.

Then we were left to navigate Tijuana. Up to this point we've been navigating with a book and google maps on Seth's iPhone. Now that we were in Mexico, it meant we'd have to rely on our Garmin GPS. Seth turned it on, only to find that the maps woldn't load. Which meant that we had to navigate through a huge Mexican city with an unsafe reputation -- all without a GPS. Our only map was not detailed enough. Luckily Seth's Spanish pulled through for directions and we both have a decent sense of direction...we found our way onto the highway. We can't say that riding on Mexico 1 through Tijuana is the safest route. It's 6 miles up with 6 lanes of fast moving traffic. But -- we made it!! And at the top of those 6 miles, the road drops down and we were suddenly in Rosarito along the ocean.

While in Rosarito we were able to get some Mexican money, eat some Mexican food and drink some Mexican beer. Good times.

Our second day ended up being our second longest at 52 miles....and rivals our most difficult days. We expected flat with 1 big hill, but instead found rolling hills along the coast and 1 monster climb into the mountains that led to several medium-sized climbs.

Today was awesomely difficult but we made it to Ensenada. The terrain has changed back to difficult climbing only this time there's the added element of heat. We're always up for a good challenge!

Wow. Here we are, in a hotel room 2 miles north of the Mexican border. We are prepping everyting - our gear, our heads, getting our last taste of American food and dark beer and pumpkin pie. We are ready for the next step of this adventure despite how huge this step may feel right now.



We are posting this blog so that everyone is updated on our last week of activity, pictures and all.....and because we are unsure of when we will have internet again to send updates.



This past week has actually been quite restful in terms of cycling. We have been busy on our rest days with last minute adjustments and preparations to our gear as well as visiting family. We started the week by visiting Box Wheelchairs in Norco, CA for some adjustments to Seth's chair (this is the company who sponsored Seth with his awesome wheelchair -- definitely check them out). Then we spent time with family in Dana Point, exploring replicas of historic boats and enjoying some beach time.

From Dana Point, we continued riding, as you guessed it, SOUTH! We stopped in Carlsbad for a night and rode through Camp Pendleton before making it to San Diego to stay with Kelly's cousin, Stacey. While we were in San Diego we got to use Stacey's car to visit Challenged Athletes Foundation (they gave Seth a grant to help cover his handcycle...fantastic folks!) and run errands for last minute restocking of our gear. Riding around town with the air conditioning, going from point A to point B without any physical effort was quite a treat, one we do not take for granted. In the following pictures, you will see that we were haunted by the flat tire spirits.

Our plans are to continue to push our pace through the Baja until we meet up with Kelly's parents around Thanksgiving. As we hit towns along the way, we will continue updating as much as possible though we will no longer have the convenience of a data plan.

Thanks again to everyone for all of your support. Continue to spread the word on the importance of movement and physicality...and do yourself a favor by doing something active today.

Hasta Luego