Colima

Colima got added to my list of places to go pretty early on - I'd heard about a volcano nearby that you could hike up, and I'd been told by a friend that it was a cool town as well. When I rolled into town I expected to spend one night there, but after spending the evening in town, I decided I needed to stay an entire day there and have a second night.

But you know what they say about plans and mice and stuff.

Compromises Pt. 2

In the last post I talked about two of the compromises I made when preparing for the trip that ended up causing me problems, and how I resolved them as I was leaving Guadalajara. You might think, having fixed two things that I'd previously screwed up, the rest of the day would go smoothly.
Yeah, of course not.

Compromises, Pt. 1

When preparing for a trip like this, or taking a trip like this, there's a lot of decisions to be made. How much should I bring, what things, should I buy good stuff so it'll last or cheap stuff I can replace, etc. On some occasions, I've made compromises - instead of buying the best, or exactly what I wanted, I kept an old one I already had, or tried something new, or tried for a "best of both worlds" sort of situation.

And it seems like every single compromise I made has come back to haunt me.

City Living

Every time I've pulled into a big city, I've found myself... overwhelmed, perhaps? I definitely don't enjoy the "feel" nearly as much as when I pull into some small beach town, or a little village on some back highway. Big cities grow on me over time, but that first arrival is rough. Guadalajara was no different.

Hostel-ity

For the first time on the trip I stayed in a hostel instead of a cheap (or expensive) hotel or camping. And it was 100% worth it.

I pulled into Sayulita in the afternoon after a pretty long day of riding, and made my way to one of the two hostels I'd heard about in town. "The Amazing Hostel" was a block or two farther from city center, but looked like a cool place. And man was it ever.

Splurge

Okay - been a little behind on blog posts. Each of the last two nights I've sat down at the laptop, opened up a new post... and then not written anything. So I'm gonna catch up, because it's actually been a pretty busy couple of days.

In Mazatlan, I ended up staying in a hotel for $43 for one night - by far the most expensive night I've had so far, especially when you add on the $13 dinner I had too. While I won't be spending that much often, in Mazatlan it worked out pretty well.

I'm on a Boat

Finally made my way down to La Paz to catch the ferry across. I realized as I was arriving in town that, had I planned a little better, I could have made it to the Tuesday ferry and been moving on two days earlier. But I'm actually pretty glad I didn't.