Gringos Mojados

Today was the first dry day of the trip, and we still got wet. But nobody is complaining today. It would be pointless to be upset with a gray whale anyway. More on that later. The blog hasn't taken off yet and I feel empty of flavorful words at the moment but enough has happened already to force my hand. Lez break it down.

 AMURRCA

 The trip started smoothly enough, or something. We packed until after midnight on Monday and managed to leave only a half hour late from Seattle in the Penske on Tuesday morning, which we took to Southern California to avoid riding the motorcycles through cold, wet weather. As most people who read this already know, there was no such weather in the Northwest that week, but it's cool we found it later. Alex driving, Joe riding shotgun, and Tim mushed on the space between the only two seats that come in a three-person Penske. Not bad for a few blocks. Give it the 15 1/2 hours it took us to get to my aunt's house in Marin and you'll never envy Tim's catalog-worthy posterior again. We woke up early Wednesday morning in Marin, mushed Tim again, and reached Santa Ana at around 4 to drop off the truck. All three bikes made it there, but ours didn't make it out of the truck with the chain still on, which I had installed myself just two days before. So obviously, that made no sense... Anyway I expertly reinstalled the chain in the back of the truck with one of the five remaining spare links we brought. A few minutes later I was in a neighboring parking lot expertly reinstalling the chain with one of the four remaining spare links we brought. The third time did prove to be the charm, but only because it was the first time I used all of the pieces that come in a spare chain pack. Next time I open something I've never seen before, I'll assume everything inside has a purpose.

 Valuable lessons learned and logged, we hit the highway to finish the trip to San Diego where we met Kali and spent our last stateside night with her gracious friends, Jaycee and Mario. Mario was a bro in the most endearing of ways, and his successful career in insurance sales was an unexpected essential. He sold Kali a couple days worth of insurance that we decided she needed to both drive the last few miles in California and then to cross the border. We left much later than expected, but we did leave, so hey... that's good...

MEHEECO

 Crossing into Tijuana, the weather met our expectations. It made it easy to "meh" our concernst over not having acquired any of the legally required(?) vehicle import documentation we expected to buy at the border. At this point we mostly just try not to talk about what might happen on the way out of the country without that paperwork. Because of our late start we only made it to Ensenada, one of the northernmost towns on the Baja peninsula. The town was fine - touristy, overpriced, comfortable enough. That stuff always applies in a special way to cheapskates though, which is why the first room we walked into at our hotel of choice was adorned wall-to-ceiling with mirrors and had a swooping red vinyl sex chair. We laughed of course, but were fully prepared to settle in when a friendly sex hotel worker-or-patron directed us to a more appropriate room, this one with two beds and a number on the door that matched the number on the key. Somewhere over the course of that other shit I wrote, group tensions had already risen. Group uncertainty will rain on a traveler's parade more than: Friday morning I don't actually remember if we had a concrete plan (a group trip necessity that continues to elude us) because all I remember is the rain. I'm going to say that we probably wanted to drive really far that day but desire lives in the world of luxury and we lived in another world that day so who really knows. I can say, though, that we did not drive really far that day. We made it to San Quintin, just a few hours away. Wikipedia told me a few minutes ago that the Baja peninsula has some of the least precipitation on the planet. For future reference, all of it falls on Friday, February 28th... so watch out. On the brink of suicide we took a turnoff with a hotel sign and ended up at a resort on an expansive beachfront compound that put us up for cheap and had everything required to foster the sensation of being inside a building - namely walls and a ceiling. On top of that though, a bar. Our chemical happiness over the next few hours facilitated the bartender's financial happiness, hopefully so much so that he didn't mind Tim and I emptying the bar of other tourists with a loud and spirited argument about jack shit.

Tensions remained the next morning as the group flipped and flopped to Tim's justifiable and irrepressible fury, only to decide last minute to go against his wishes and leave our (sunny) paradise for... somewhere else. We aimed for Guerrero Negro, chosen for its distance from San Quintin and its legendary whale watching. The ride was 400km (figure it out, yankee scum) and we barely made it by nightfall. The first third of the leg was a fantasy. There was: sun, music, smooth roads, twisties, epic desertscapes, a cow. There was not: traffic, tension, communication, shits to give about anything. The remaining two thirds were fucking. weak. In my memory everything turned when Tim and I hydroplaned across a flooded road, looking cooler than you have ever hoped to look but getting wetter than we had been since 18 hours earlier. After that the hills left and the winds came. With little topographic protection we lost some serious velocity. We weaved through most of the rain, but there was still enough to get us dirty and wet and cold. Also, Tim and I crashed. Tim threw his helmet. Everyone peed. We kept going. It was dope. We made it to Guerrero Negro (in the rain) and picked a hotel with secure parking. To appease Tim's distaste for Mexican food (...) we ate pizza from a place with a young white cook. He convinced the owner to let us bring beer in as long as we kept it hidden. They forgot to tell us not to dropkick the empty bottles under the table, dummies. 

LAS BALLENAS

 Joe woke up early the next morning and accidentally woke everyone up, as practiced. Luckily, it jump started our best day yet and likely one of the most memorable of the trip. He researched and reserved a whale watching trip in a nearby lagoon. We all like whales because we are good people, so everyone was down. The drive to the lagoon, captained by a friendly guide who had a name of some sort and gave us mayonnaise sandwiches, took us through a chunk of water-logged land used for harvesting salt. Guerrero Negro is home to the biggest salt mine in the world, which, pretty effortlessly it seemed, extracts salt from the sea water through evaporation. $alt. We saw a couple glistening vessels in the distance as we approached the launching grounds and were sufficiently excited to maybe have seen a couple whales. That probably wasn't even worth mentioning because THEN WE SAW LIKE 100 GRAY WHALES A FEW FEET AWAY AND ONE SPLASHED US WITH HER TAIL AS SHE WENT UNDER OUR BOAT AND TIM FUCKING TOUCHED OOONNNNE! It was crazy. It was like Jarassic Park in the water. Tim was like that kid who I think was named Tim and got shocked when he peed on the electric fence. Or maybe he just touched it and I'm thinking of pee because Real Tim won't stop peeing every 30 minutes. Anyway the whole thing was shocking, humbling, beautiful, and befuddling. It was surreal. We've been riding that high all afternoon and it has injected a raging hit of black tar positivity straight into our jugulars. Tonight we plan again. We have plenty of photos and three other versions of everything I just wrote to share. We love you all. Back soon. 

 BERG'S EYE VIEW

 -The pizza place we chose had a young white cook who they sent out to translate. We decided his name is Forresst, he is 25 years old, and he knocked somebody up while studying the whales for his Ivy League biology program and has been here ever since.
-Tim loves every place we go. It's pretty special, but we aren't appreciating it enough yet.
-Joe's Dead Dog Count, heretofore referred to as JDDC: 4.
-We have now had tacos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Flavored have included birria, al pastor, carne asada, fried fish.
 -I'm pretty sure we've mostly had tasty food, but we've been referring to quite a few things as being "on the delicious side of the nausea line at least," so... I don't really know... -The military checkpoints have been unexpectedly smooth. We've been waved through every single one.
-We (don't really deserve to deserve to include myself in this particular collective to be honest) DEFINITELY all got the right bikes for this trip. The roads have required us to do some pretty bad-ass-but-actually-tame-but-still-bad-ass dual sport riding already. I expect mainland roads to provide more challenges.