Noemi and I got home Monday morning at 6:30am after a 24.5 hour, 1100+ mile ride up from Hermosillo Mexico. Since Noemi is much more verbal (in both spoken and written forms) than me, I'll leave it to her to give a more in depth report of the trip. In fact, I think you'll probably see both a trip synopsis (short), followed some time later by the official trip report (long). I'll keep my summary very short. Mileages are guestimates since I don't have my log book in front of me and are subject to correction by Noemi, the official trip biographer.
I think we both rode about 4700 miles. However Noemi's TweetyBike logged about 800 more miles than my bike. Keep reading for an explanation.
Weather-wise we had everything from 70+ degree sunny weather in the canyon bottoms (Batopilas), to freezing temperatures and 4-6 inches of snow along the canyon rims (Creel), to steady rain the last 400 miles home from LA to the SF Bay area.
Road-wise we had had everything from miles and miles of interstate (getting down and back), to paved twisty mountain roads, to wide-open graded dirt roads, to extremely rough, rocky, switch-backed, dirt roads climbing the sides of some pretty steep mountains, to dirt roads in the valley lowlands which had bike-sucking mud holes and bridge-less river and stream crossings. Its interesting to see how much water comes spitting out the spark plug holes when you remove them and kick the engine over after partially submerging a GS.
Mechanically, we had several bike stalls after particularly wet/deep water crossings which were easily fixed by pulling the plug boots and drying them out. My clutch plate broke (the sheet-metal spokes broke) 15 miles south of Creel, which necessitated trucking it back to Creel in a van, pulling the transmission to ascertain it was the clutch and not the transmission input splines (thank God), frantic telephoning to Iron Horse BMW in Tuscon, AZ, having Iron Horse FedEx the new clutch plate to El Paso, TX on the US/Mexico border, and a 2.5 day, 800 mile round trip 2-up on Noemi's bike from Creel to El Paso and back to pick up the clutch plate, and finally putting the bike back together.
No bandito stories to tell, in fact not even anything close to a "bad" experience. The Mexican people we encountered and interacted with were very friendly, helpful, and gracious. Especially at putting up with our attempts at communicating with them in Spanish.
This definitely ranks up there with, or maybe even above, my Alaska trip for my favorite bike trip.
-- Doug Ruth | SRI International | '91 BMW R100GS PD | AMA #:197665 -- druth@erg.sri.com | 333 Ravenswood Ave. | Lic. #:BMBLBMW | -- Work:415-859-3860 | Menlo Park, CA 94025 | '81 BMW R100G/S PD| -- Home:415-969-5071 | | '87 Honda XR600R |
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