May 26th, 12:30pm local time
San Luis Potosi, Mexico
GPS: N22 09.662, W100 58.512
Distance Traveled: 487km

What great way to start a day.  After one of the longest days we've ridden yet, it's nice to sleep in – it was nearly 7:30am when I rolled out of bed and into the best shower i've had in a week.  It even had hot water!  This bathroom had a toilet seat, and toilet paper (you wouldn't think it, but these two items are hard to come by).  Justin was right, too, about pushing for Mexico City – traffic outside was at a virtual standstill, and the constant honking of horns was what really woke us up so early.  Plus, I forgot to turn the air conditioning on last night, and woke up in a hot sweat under the blankets.

We had neglected to eat yesterday for lack of time, so mission #1 this morning was to find a decent restaurant and really tuck in.  I've been craving Mexican food pretty much since the beginning of this trip, and this was my first chance to get some.  We found a restaurant not far away and managed to order some breakfast.  I got a smallish plate, and was kind of disappointed at the size, until I started eating and was full halfway through.  We've been eating so little and seldom throughout this trip that our stomachs have shrunk – I managed to finish the whole plate, but I felt as full as I would after, say, thanksgiving dinner.

With that, we were back to the hotel to try and find us some tires.  We'd located a few motorcycle dealerships in the yellow pages, and were going to go out and try to find one, but wiser heads prevailed.  We asked the hotel manager, who spoke rough english, to call some of the dealerships and see if they had any.

Two hours later, we still hadn't found a place that carried any tires that would work.  A city of umpteen million people, twelve honda dealers, nine yamaha dealers, four suzuki dealers, three kawasaki dealers, three BMW dealers and four harley dealers, and we found TWO tires that would fit.  Joshua (our hotel manager) is an awesome guy – he's even really into computers, and had a liquid-cooled system in his office (no public internet at the hotel, but he let us use his computer to try and find some tires).  He spent hours on the phone, draining the batteries in two cell phones, to find us what we needed.  When we'd finally located them, and were going to go pick them up, I tried to tip him for his invaluable service, but he refused.  That really warmed me up a bit.  Apparently the address Justin had been given for his broken windshield was not a Suzuki dealer, but some kind of insurance adjustor (we think) and with time running so short and our search for tires so hard, we decided to just forget about the windshield.  Our tires were about an hour away in Mexico City, and we enlisted a taxi driver to show us the way to the Harley dealer that had the only two tires in Mexico City.  Since Justin and I had more tread left than either Sean or Robbie, we'd decided (necessarily) that he and I would be able to make it to El Paso on the tread we had left.

Good thing we did, too, 'cause if i thought every other city we've driven in so far was bad, Mexico City makes them look like a walk on the beach.  Drivers so aggressive that one guy driving an old Beetle actually hit dad on his motorcycle.  Fortunately, it wasn't a hard nudge, and dad didn't get knocked over.  After that, we all turned the aggression metres way up, and just owned our section of pavement, blocking traffic and stopping cars so that we could all make our way through to follow our taxi driver.  I kicked one person's car when they tried to force me into oncoming traffic.

The dealer didn't seem pleased that we weren't riding Harleys, and initially refused to let us use his tire change machine, claiming that it would work only on Harley wheels and tires (Justin told me this was a load of crap).  After we'd explained to him what we were doing, he reluctantly said we could use his machine.  Five minutes after that, he'd changed his mind again, claiming it was 'broken'.  But he had our tires, and there was a place down the street, he said, that would be able to do the rubber swap.

The tire guy down the street was awesome.  He didn't have a machine, or speak english, but he had the biggest tire spoons Justin said he's ever seen – each was easily three and a half feet long, and he had our tires swapped out inside of ten minutes, and only charged us $5 to do it.  We had started disassembling our rear tires at the Harley dealership after they'd told us we could do it there, and had left the cotter pins for the tire bolts laying on the sidewalk.  

Our tire guy took one of our pins and ran down the street to a hardware store, returning in five minutes with replacement cotter pins, and he didn't even charge us for 'em.

We were finally ready to get on our way about 4:30pm, and got our taxi driver to show us to the freeway.  He'd hung with us for five hours, driving us all over Mexico City, and he only charged us $90.  We tipped him $10, and considered it one of the wisest $100 we've spent yet on this trip.  He gave us detailed instructions on the freeway to get us quickly out of Mexico City, and even gave us his cell number in case we needed help further down the road.

Apparently motorcycles are not allowed on freeways inside Mexico City, so initially we stuck to the side roads that followed it, but after seeing how much faster the freeway was running, we decided to hop onto it with our bikes and risk getting pulled over.  Shortly after doing this, we hit stop &amp; go traffic.  It took us an hour and a half to travel thirty kilometres to where the road opened up again and we were finally able to get going again.  Justin got frustrated shortly after sitting for a while, and we following him for about an hour, splitting lanes and riding up the shoulders of the road while people tried to cut us off and force us off the highway.  Can't wait to get somewhere that has decent, considerate drivers.

Ever since Colombia, my left hand has been bothering me – the hugely twisty roads there had us all shifting pretty much constantly for twelve hours, and I guess i stressed my hand out.  Every morning it feels very tight, and my fingers snap into place like i'm double-jointed or something.  The stop &amp; go traffic, with its' constant clutch feathering and shifting all over the place stressed it out some more, and it's hard to type, right now, at my usual pace.  Hopefully, we'll hit some straight, fast freeway tomorrow where i'll not be shifting constantly.

We were only able to make it five hours down the road, to a place called San Juan Pistoti before Sean started weaving across the road 'cause he was so tired, so we got ourselves a hotel for the night.  This place is very American, and we checked out a Holiday Inn Express before deciding that $200 for a hotel room in Mexico was way too much for six hours, and moved to a cheaper (but very nice) place down the street.

Strangely enough, though, we were unable to find a single open restaurant anywhere nearby, and we ended up eating gas station pizza &amp; hot dogs for dinner.  We're really going to miss the fresh fruit stands from now on, too – haven't seen any since southern Mexico.

Tomorrow – El Paso, USA.  Can't WAIT to get out of these spanish-speaking countries and into an english place, even if they do speak strangely in Texas.

Ryan Noble,
San Luis Potosi, Mexico