Reset

Nine days my trip has been going. Nine days, only four of which were spent NOT sleeping in San Ignacio.

I was a little hesitant when I got back on the bike this morning. It was kind of like starting over, in a way. I'd been stationary longer than I'd been moving.

But once I got moving again, I could feel the momentum come right back.

Don't get me wrong - I loved San Ignacio. If you'd told me I had to spend 5 days somewhere in Baja only walking, I certainly wouldn't have picked it out of the lineup. But getting stuck there wasn't all bad, that's for sure.

I moved around a little bit at the beginning - first in one hotel, then went to the doctor and found out I'd be staying four more days so I decided to move to a cheaper motel. Stayed there one night, but the internet access was so terrible I figured it was worth the $9 a night for better internet if I'm disabled and can't move well, so I went back to the first one, and then switched rooms when one of their WiFi routers somehow went down in the storm and half their building didn't have signal. Four nights, four moves.

But the good thing that came out of the one night in the cheap hotel was meeting Oscar and his family. Oscar's 87 years old and has been running that hotel for 40 years now - 35 of those years with his wife, who passed away a few years ago. Out of his 10 kids, 4 of them still live within 50 feet of the hotel and his house - two of them helped me move my motorcycle and me between hotels (twice actually), and the third spent quite a bit of time helping me with my Spanish. Antonio, Dago, and Martin spend most of their evenings sitting in chairs in the hotel driveway with their dad just hanging out and talking. Well, "talking" - it's generally a few minutes of silence followed by a few sentences, and then back to silence. I think with me there it was probably more talking than they usually do.

I went back to the hotel every single night I was there to hang out and talk with them - "practicar y platicar," as Martin put it. We talked a little about their lives and what they're doing, my travels, my foot, or whatever else struck our fancy. Each night seemed to have it's own type of beautiful sunset too:

It was nice to get to explore a small place fully too. Besides getting to know a few of the locals, like Oscar and Victor (the owner of a local restaurant), I got to see parts of the town I would have avoided altogether if I wasn't completely bored and wandering around. San Ignacio has some very interesting architecture - central to which is the Mission, but there's plenty of other interesting buildings ranging from almost brand new to pretty run down.

Mission fromthe front in the day. Very cool building.

One of the side streets that I explored my last day

Another view of the Mission and some of the attached architecture.

The garden of a nearby cafe.

It was nice to take all that in, and get some time to relax, and have some (much needed) time to plan and do some Spanish lessons.

But once I got moving again... let me tell you, that felt really nice.

I was pretty hesitant at first. I finally took the cast off last night, and found this. Not exactly what I was hoping for when the cast came off. But overall didn't feel too bad, and I was able to walk on it. Took a shower to wash off four days of soaked-up sweat, and got a good night's sleep. When I woke up, I slowly got my stuff together and got the bike loaded up... but I found myself procrastinating on putting the boots on.

Maybe it was the fact that the bruises lined up with the boot. Maybe it was that the last time I'd had them on, I wasn't sure if the trip would continue. Whatever it was... it felt like crossing a barrier by putting the boot on.

Finally, with everything else on the bike ready to go, I put them on.

And I hopped on the bike, and left San Ignacio.

And immediately - immediately, as in before I left the hotel parking lot - I felt better. Once I got on the highway and started riding, it finally felt real again. All the tension I'd been building up over the past few days, wondering how it would go when I got back on the bike, trying to figure out how to handle this and what I could do to get around it - it all faded away.

Well, not completely actually. I still had to get an x-ray to get it checked out for fractures.

But after a quick stop in Santa Rosalía at a radiography clinic, I was able to leave those doubts behind too.

"The morphology and bone density are preserved. Joint spaces are of normal width. No fracture or tumorous lesions. The soft tissues are normal.

So onward I go, after a quick reset.

Bye bye, San Ignacio. I'll try to come back sometime.