Back in the big city
Hola from Guadalajara! When we left Tepic a few days ago, we had a goal—to make it to Guadalajara in four days time so we could see a futbol match with one of Guadalajara’s two teams, the Chivas (goats). We didn’t know it at the time, but the three days of riding we did between Tepic and Guadalajara were some of the hardest days we’ve faced so far. Even though we were on the toll road (and relatively safe), and the grades were not as steep as some we’ve faced, the hills were long and relentless. I should mention as a side note that from a few km outside of Magdalena to a few km outside of Tequila, the shoulder of the toll road was paved with red gravel, with lots of loose gravel on top of it. That basically made it difficult to ride on the shoulder at low speed, and impossible to ride on at high speed. During that stretch, we rode on the side of the right lane, but didn’t have any problems with traffic, as the lanes were wide and most people passed us in the left lane anyway.
We were a little worried our first day when it took us an hour to ride through Tepic during rush hour. We had hoped to make it to a town called Ixtlan Del Rio the first day, but ended up stopping about 10 km earlier in a little town called Jala. There were some Toltec (sorry, I was wrong about them being Aztec) ruins outside of Ixtlan that we considered stopping at the next day, but we decided that since we were a little behind schedule that we would pass on them. Well, the fact that there weren’t any direct access to the ruins from the toll road also helped us make up our minds. I think it was half-way through this day that we saw signs saying “Mountainous Zone Begins”. Cindy and I were of course thinking, “You’re telling us that the mountains are starting NOW?!?” We mercifully found a nice flat stretch toward the end of the day as we approached the town of Magdalena. At that point, we had to decide whether or not to push on to Tequila. Personally, I was getting sicker and feeling like crap, but if we made it to Tequila, we could take a rest day with no riding before heading into Guadalajara. So we decided to push on, thinking we only had 10 km to go. That was, umm…a math error on my part. Shortly after passing Magdalena, we saw a sign that Tequila was actually 18 km away! So we rolled into Tequila around dusk, exhausted and very happy we had a day off ahead of us.
One of the signs that you are in tequila country is the neverending fields of the blue agave cactus, planted into just about every spare patch of hillside. The big thing to do in the town of Tequila is to go on tours of the various distilleries. There are a lot of groups that set up shop in the plaza near the church, and boy, oh boy, do they target gringos. As soon as we stepped onto the plaza about 3 different people started making a beeline for us. We went on a tour where we got to see the entire process, from pineapple (the core of the cactus after the leaves are removed) to final product. Our tour group was very small, and actually included a Mexican who lives in Seattle (the son of they guy who owns the Guaymos restaurants). They arranged an english-speaking tour guide for us, so we had a parallel tour to the spanish-speaking group. Afterwards, we hung out with the Seattle guy, his girlfriend, and our tour guides and had a beer (ours was the last tour of the day, and well, everybody’s friendlier after they’ve had a few sips of tequila).
We left Tequila Saturday morning, and the Chivas were playing at 7 pm that evening. We had 65 km to go—starting with the steep 5 km climb out of Tequila back to the toll road. Everything would need to go smoothly for us to have a chance to make it to the game…and somehow it all did. The ride was mostly the same as the last couple of days (hills, trucks, corn, blue agave), until the toll road ended. We debated whether or not we should stop riding and try to catch a bus into town, as we had been on the road for 5 hrs and only made it halfway to Guadalajara. But our attempts at enquiring about buses were unsuccessful—most people seemed convinced that we could ride into downtown Guadalajara without a problem. We had 5 hrs until game time at the point, and we had the sense that we had gotten most of our climbing out of the way, so we kept going, hoping the second half of the day would be faster than the first. It was a little scary at times (think riding 99 into downtown Seattle), but quickly gave way to the more mellow city center. We made it to our hotel 1.5 hrs before gametime, caught a quick bus up to the stadium, and then had to stand in line for tickets. We got tickets 20 min before gametime, with just enough time to wolf down some tacos before heading into the stadium. The visiting team (Queretaro) isn’t highly ranked, so the stadium wasn’t packed, but the home crowd was still plenty loud. And although the Gallos Blancos (White Roosters) lost 0-2, they had lots of chances, and for a lot of the night, were actually the better team. The Chivas had two fluky first half goals, on a penalty kick and a beautiful curving free kick.
Unfortunately, I managed to give Cindy my cold, so we’re going to hang out a few more days in Guadalajara before taking our route through Michoacan to Mexico City. Both of us are looking to buy some more comfy bike shorts. We know Guadalajara has a big biking community—they shut down one of their downtown streets every Sunday for bikers—but it may be tricky to actually find the stores 
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