Wednesday – Durango, Mexico

Because we were smart, yesterday we had bought some doughnut type breakfast stuff to eat, also some milk and once again thanks to Lisa, some nice black tea 🙂 Vincent had been mucking about with the WEP key supplied by the hotel and worked out there were too many numbers and after a short while found the correct extra number to drop off, it is a maximum of 10 numbers. This was great and well done V, for some reason the crappy Vista on my pute had accepted the 11 numbers and made it a ‘local only’ connection, if it had told me it was incorrect I would have looked into it a bit different, while V’s pute told him it was incorrect, I think he is running the new Windows 10 or something. Anyway, after a bit of time posting yet another day, we were on the road around 10am. As we left town we passed a statue of Pancho Villa, a master bandido from back in the old days.

We headed off on some pretty straight uninspiring roads and of course the mandatory small villages with suspension wrecking topes!!!

A bit like back home seeing the drive through bottlos!

Some more long straight stretches, which were made more pleasant by the smell of all the yellow wild flowers bordering the road, some windmills that remind me of home and another military checkpoint, for our safety of course, although we were not stopped at this one. 🙂

Now, we were aiming for a place on the map called La Zarca, which seemed a good place to fuel up, well that was a shock but should not have been because they had no fuel, dammit!! It was our own fault as we had passed a few places earlier, I do not need to stop as often as V as I have a larger tank, but on this occasion I had declined to fill up when leaving Parral as I had enough to get to La Zarca. Well, we pressed on but for some reason both our GPS’ told us to head back, we had not found La Zarca yet. In the end we went back to the food shop where the servo was and we were told to go across the road where we could fill up from the back of a truck, whew 🙂

The price in Mexico is set by the government and is at this stage P$7.72/litre so for those back home that is a massive AU0.64c, I am not sure I can afford it 😆 All servos charge the same price, but this time we had to pay P$10/l which is AU0.83c still not much and it was needed so it is a sellers market. On we go, we are not in a major hurry but wanted to get to Durango and find a motel in good time, more mainly empty roads as we were on the back road, so that meant the occasional farmer in the way, more topes more flowers, basically just a day for riding with no pressure 🙂

We stopped at a lake where V looked up a recommended place from Lonely Planet, there were two with secure parking mentioned, so we dialled them into the GPS and eventually hit town at a good time of 4.30.

We immediately got stuck in a major refurbishment in the city centre, where the two hotels just happen to be 😦 After some dodgy riding we managed to find the 2nd of the two and promptly booked in, the actual secure parking is very secure, it is inside the hotel lobby 🙂 This is us getting the bike off the busy street into the hotel, a very slow and tight manoeuvre without taking out any of the furnishings!!

After I moved to a different room, because of the lack of an internet signal in the original one, we headed off down to the main square, looking for a beer and food and I know I shouldn’t have, but I did take a photo of a church!

After wandering around the surrounding streets we eventually found a bar where we ordered a couple of beers, Dos Equies at last 🙂 But, lucky for us we did not order food, because after taking the first mouthful of beer, we found out it is Karaoke night, in Spanish!! Not that that makes any difference because it was loud and crap and would have been crap in any language!!! Someone should shoot the bastard who thought this up 😦

The barman was nice and apologised for the noise, but we did not take long to finish the beer and go somewhere else. Some blokes outside pointed up the street and said there was another bar and a seafood place, so we ended up there and bought some dinner, I had the following, three fillets of fish in a cheese salsa sauce, the cheese was from Chihuahua, rice, mashed potatoes and steamed vegies, it was great, better than I expected 🙂

This place had some vintage gear in it including an old Ford car and an old motorcycle, very nice 🙂

We went next door to the bar after dinner and watched a bit of baseball, before a couple of chaps next to us were surprised by the sound English voices and introduced themselves, these are Matty and Joe, father and son from LA who are down here for a mining enterprise, mainly Platinum, but other minerals as well.

We had a couple of beers and made it back to the hotel after 10, we did not have a big day planned but there was not much to do anyway, the internet had failed and was not expected to be up until tomorrow maybe, or Manyana! 😦 I could still read a book though, which I did 🙂

Day – 275 miles and 443 km
Trip – 39,162 miles and 63,025 km

Salud
TravellingStrom

USACanadaMexico

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