It’s 0530 in the morning on October 19, 2022, and we’re in Sahuaripa, Sonora, Mexico. The air temperature is now 63 degrees but later it will be in the 90’s. I’m going to miss that warm weather because by the time we arrive in Creel, about six hours from now, a cold is moving in with a low on of 46 degrees.
Today is a long day. Normal people—back home are doing normal people stuff but, where’s the challenge in that. There’s no restaurants in Sahuaripa because Covid took them all out but, an enterprising grandma opened her house up and made her living room a restaurant.
We sat on large stools watching three generations of women cooking our meals. The house specialty was anything from picadillo to hamburger to a beef broth, bone in Mexico style stew. I ordered it after carefully watching what Yoda Luis and Roberto ordered, plus I added real Mexi fries to my order. French fries in this side of Mexico are cooked with real lard. They’re not served to you piping hot because the lard first needs time to drip off.
We are all riding motorcycles from our homelands in the USA to Copper Canyon in Mexico. All of us, except now, maybe not Ray will be riding to Creel by the end of the day.
Ray all the way from Nuevo Jersey, USA rides a 1990 BMW motorcycle with Dakar to Paris badging on the tank. And yesterday the single rear shock on it exploded when he hit a rather large, according to him pothole and disintegrated the innards of the shock. Why didn’t you miss it or speed way up over it like Todd and I were doing was my first thoughts.
When first seeing his Dakar to Paris antique I pretended to be Gpskevin and did a fairly accurate representation of him for Yoda Roberto. “Yoda Roberto, I said, I don’t think this bike is going to make it all the way and back.” But Kevin, Roberto would say; it made it all the way from Paris to Dakar. He laughed, I laughed, we both laughed some more. And now we both know that Kevin’s instincts are always spot on.
I now say to Ray; “If I were you,” I’d check the oil, maybe set the valves, and then, I’d park that thing as a museum piece and get myself a newer BMW, by several decades at least.
One of the advantages of having a shared obsession with motorcycles is that it brings diverse people together yet, as with any group, the riders have many distinctive characters whose idiosyncrasies only start to show after the third or fourth day. Don’t ask Ray about the inner workings of his BMW, it’s pedigree or even the parts now required to fix it. He’ll tell you in infinite details. He has already found the part and purchased it. It now has to travel from somewhere USA to his wife in New Jersey who will then FedEx it to Mexico City, where it will then be moved to yet another city. Ray is scheduled to take the El Chefe train at Creel, then Uber to a small non descript warehouse in I think Mazatlan probably run by a former cartel account by the name of Walter to retrieve his new shock replacement. And then he’s expected to join the group at Topolobambo to catch the ferry with us back to La Paz.
On the road to Creel we sometimes pass though small towns and very rural areas. Something that really sticks out is how the people live so simply. Some are working small patches of land, others are transporting things or selling foods or other products that they either grow or make.
More to follow…………
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