December 25

A bright, clear and still cool morning. The fireworks were tame, and I fell asleep at about 9:30. And then at 11:30 a bomb went off next door, followed in two seconds by another down the block, which was followed two seconds later by another 500 meters further away, and so on for at least 12 of them. I got up and got dressed and stood out in the yard, but there were no rockets or roman candles visible from here, just the noise of firecrackers. Orion was at his zenith, nearly directly overhead, and I could locate Cassiopeia, but not the dippers nor Polaris, they were too dim in the glow of the lights.

Ruben took some digital photographs during our ride and he will come by soon, but not today, to download them to this machine so I can e-mail them.

December 24

A storm last night, with high winds, rain, and bit of thunder and lightning. It was cold this morning, for these latitudes. I wore a jacket over a sweatshirt, and thought of putting on sweat pants under my jeans. This place is unheated. I stayed here all morning, drinking tea and studying Spanish. And then at noon Ruben and Alicia came over and took me out to breakfast. Their breakfast, my second lunch. They will be back shortly and we are going for an eighteen km bike ride.

A beautiful ride. We started late, but the wind died down and the sky cleared. We rode north of the city on an unpaved country road that parallels the face of the mountains about a kilometer east of them. These are mountains without foothills, and a level plain lies to the east as far as I could see. There are large fields and cattle ranches out there, and blue mesas on the northeast horizon, at least 60 km away. We rode through a small herd of cattle, and past small ranchos with dogs and chickens and music, to a camp owned by Alicia's father. The sun set behind the mountains as we rode back, its yellow light filtering through the passes between the peaks. They are more rugged, than the Rockies, but not as massive, and in their way just as impressive. Eso si es Mexico. Ruben gave me a baseball cap for Christmas, on an impulse, after I wished them una feliz Navidad as we parted. It is a very well made Mexican duplicate of the Swiss army cap. In camouflage. I need a cap and I like it. It will be a hit in Texas and New Mexico. True camouflage.

The fireworks have begun, another Mexican tradition. Ruben pointed out the church where those bells are being rung, but I'm too tired to go. Besides, I've got my Christmas cold. I'll sleep in my sleeping bag tonight.

December 23

Will, of Will and Eleanor, calls the Tamaulipas, the Mexican state of which Victoria is the capital, "tamale upas", fully aware of his mispronunciation. He also expects Mexicans to make at least as much effort to speak English as he does Spanish. That expectation wouldn't be reciprocated in his bar and grill in South Dakota, I suspect. I have heard many times, "If they wanna live here, let 'em learn English." Eleanor is trying to learn Spanish and is doing better at it than I am.

Rosie came by at suppertime. I had a plate of enchiladas in the brand new microwave that she gave me this morning. She was all gussied up, driving her little red car that is filled to capacity with what looks like junk, and she gave me a calendar. It has a picture of a dove on a background with the bright colors of a serape, and a bit of advertising. Paz en la Terra. We exchanged "Feliz Navidad"s.

I'm prepared for Christmas. I loaded in a lot of food, I have clean clothes, new shoes, beer, tequila, and a bicycle. Those bells do sound on the half hour; they must be church bells. I'll see if I can find it tomorrow and maybe go to midnight mass, if I can stay awake that long. For the last three and a half months I've been going to bed and rising with the sun, and the habit persists.

I called Erin today, and she will be with our good friends Malcolm and Dawn for Christmas dinner, along with the usual crowd of their children and sons-in-law, and other mutual and equally good friends.

As for exchanging gifts, I got an e-mail from Emily this morning. It was thoughtful and intelligent and carefully composed, expressing her contentment and happiness with her job, her hobbies, and her man, in inverse order. She does good things in this world, accumulating and spreading good karma without knowing it, through her work against the flow of global capitalism. Her letter made me very happy, and I tried to respond in kind.

December 22

On this day I bought a bottle of tequila, and drank two shots, each chased with a beer, while I cooked supper. The tequila isn't the strongest available, but it tastes good.

There are bells in this neighborhood. Crude and not in any particular key, and they chime at odd times several times a day. They chime, or bang, in two tones. There will be two or three at the higher pitch about a second apart, followed by as much as sixty at a lower pitch at twice the frequency, and end with two or three at the higher pitch again. I thought they were church bells, but they don't make any sense in that regard. Maybe it's just some guy who likes to bang on a couple of wheel rims. In addition there is the occasional shotgun blast. You can count on one at 5:45 AM, and another at six. Public alarm clocks, maybe. I'll ask Rosie.

Christmas is coming. Here, while there is all the US consumer motivational hype, there is a deeper and stronger sentiment as well. The pageant that I watched in the Plaza downtown included, besides depictions of the Virgin and Joseph, shepherds, angels of the Lord, and magi, scenes from Hell. Now that is playing loose and free with the Gospels, as I remember them, but it is also indicative that the Nativity is taken seriously and has a deeper meaning than found in, say, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

Victoria's streets are crowded with cars all the time. All the streets in the center of town are narrow and one-way, and a constant stream of traffic crawls through them. The town is as dominated by cars as is Boulder, Colorado. I'm cautious on my bike, but there are a lot of bikes in the traffic. If we are treated the way that drivers treat each other, they more courteous than those in Halifax.

December 21

Is today the winter solstice? I think so. Victoria is just north of the Tropic of Cancer. I haven't looked at a globe, nor Google Earth, but I think I am now close to the latitude of Okinawa, where I spent one and a half of the best years of my life. That was due to two factors: women and youth. I had just turned 21 when I left Okinawa.

When I left Okinawa I was a very good aircraft mechanic. Now I am a very slow bicycle mechanic. I have lost dexterity and strength in my fingers, and have lost a good deal of the sub-conscious intelligence that, for instance, places a nut squarely on a bolt and turns it in the right direction while the mind is troubleshooting the difficult problem at hand.

A crowd of motor homes, each the size of a city bus, and each towing an SUV, came into this park the day before yesterday, and left this morning. Will and Eleanor, he from South Dakota and she from Ottawa, each divorced and neither about to remarry, occupy the only RV left here, and they are leaving tomorrow. I will be the only tenant, until more Gringos come through.

Will's biography could make a country song. He drove trucks, was an owner-operator, built up a fleet of twelve, got divorced, bought a bar, and then another, and met Eleanor in southeastern Arizona. I didn't ask about his dog. He spent six years in the South Dakota National Guard. Those of us who were "regulars" called Guardsmen "weekend warriors". Eleanor is a retired teacher. She was the head of the English department at an Ottawa high school, and she sounds like it: Standard English, offhandedly conversing with excellent diction, a true gentlewoman. She rented one of these "apartments" two years ago, and has made it into what would be a very attractive and comfortable place, if she and Will did not use to store all the things they "need" that won't fit into their RV.

They drove me to a Wal-Mart today, where I bought shoes and another pair of jeans. I am concerned, here, with the way I present myself, more so than I have been for a very long time. I have not been a foreigner since I left Okinawa, and the status concerns I have here prompted those remarks on how good a mechanic I once was.

Juan continues to mess with the plumbing. He and I communicate, a little. His plumbing is eclectic: an elbow salvaged from this, a length of pipe from that, whatever works, as long as it doesn't cost anything.

December 20

I can live here, for 2 ½ months. What I have seen of Victoria doesn't appeal to me as I imagine Halifax might if I were a Mexican. So I will settle into this neighborhood, which is rich in supermarkets and other box stores, and has all the things I need, including an internet hot spot at the Villa Hotel, if I can use it without being told to go away. My life will be as Spartan as this room, but that was what I had intended when I started planning this trip. I mean to spend these days writing, meditating, exercising and housekeeping, in the order of their importance. And drinking a little beer, and cooking good food.

I will live cheaply, for a Canadian, richly for a Mexican, and eat well. Beans, rice, and tortillas at the supermarket are very cheap. In US $, a kilo of rice is $.86, of beans,$.95, of corn tortillas, $.52. With those ingredients I can make the base of at least four meals, for at most $.60 each. Salsa adds significantly to the cost. I bought three tomatoes for $.93, three chiles poblanos for $.63, a bunch of cilantro for $.40, an onion for $.24, mango juice for $.69, and a lime for $.05, for a total of $2.94. I already had garlic and cumin seeds. If that batch of salsa will last two days I'll have flavorful meals for $1.35 each. Then we come to protein. A length of chorizo, which is good for two dishes, cost $2.14. A package of five marinated chicken drumsticks was $2.39, and 250 grams of sierra cheese cost $1.47. That boosts the cost of each meal to a maximum of $2.35, or $7.00 per day. $9.00 when you add in beer, at $4.19 for a six-pack of Carta Blanca.

Juan is in the bathroom, pounding with a cold chisel and hammer to break the concrete floor away from a defective pluming joint. The prognosis isn't good. He is saying I should go to another apartment; I'm saying no. I've spent five hours cleaning this one, and the other is just as dirty as this one was, and not as well equipped. Rosie hasn't been around today.

I have a pot of beans on the stove, and those ingredients made about a quart of thick salsa. I need to call Erin. She loves the smell of beans cooking.

December 19

I just made some arroz con pollo and it is ready to be eaten, but this is more important.

Rosie's son is greying in his beard and on his chest. His eyes are clear and intelligent. Last night I remembered the drug that is used to control schizophrenics: thorazine. People taking thorazine move slowly and with deliberation, like Rosie's son. This afternoon I needed to fill a small butane tank for my stove. I was looking for Rosie, hoping for a ride to the Butane dealer, but she wasn't around. I took a look at the bathroom provided for RV tenants, Rosie's son came along and gave me a limp handshake. I told him my name, but he did not tell me his. I told him I needed to fill the tank, and was looking for Rosie to get directions to the butane dealer. Rosie's son said he knew where it was, and we walked there together, taking turns carrying the tank. He speaks English, but he doesn't have much to say to me, nor I to him.

When we got to the butane dealer he didn't know what to do. I told him, after another customer showed me, that we should get in line with our tank, and told him to ask that it be filled. Four men were filling thanks, on a platform 40cm above the yard, in which motor vehicles come and go. There is a small "No Smoking" sign on the platform. Most of the tanks that they fill, including mine, would be rejected by any propane dealer in Canada. They are of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Butane is sold here by the kilogram, and there are scales like those in doctor's offices that measure how much has been put into a tank. I got 10 kilos for 90 pesos.

There is a cross-eyed handyman whom Rose calls Juanito, and Juan and I hooked up the butane tank, using a regulator and fittings we found among the junk lying in one of the apartments. One burner of the stove is working, and I think I can get the other to work, and Rosie has promised me a new microwave.. There is running cold water, and plumbing for hot water, but no hot water heater is connected to this apartment. Juan is working on the toilet.

When the sun shines this apartment is bright, and with a paint job it could be cheerful. It was very dirty, and still is, in places. I worked on it until I needed to cook supper, which I did by the l\light of a ceiling fixture which is metal and has an astronomical motif. It casts a spot about a meter in diameter on the ceiling and a little more light, but not mech, shines through its star-shaped holes. I made a good supper and drank five cans of beer.

December 18

Ruben was in meetings all morning. I did reach him on his cell at noon, and he said he would call at one. It is now 2:30, and I am learning something about anxiety. The way I have been living, in this room and in this neighborhood, couldn't be sustained even if I wanted to, which I definitely do not.

Well, I don't have to after tomorrow morning. I rented a dinky, dirty "apartment" at the only RV camp in Victoria, about two blocks from the Villa Motel where I stayed my first night here. The apartment, room really, has a bed and a stove and cupboards and an air conditioner, a tiny bathroom, and a lot of dirt. But there are trees and grass outside, and the place is quiet (only three RVs there today), and the landlady, Rosie, whose husband died ten days ago, speaks English, and has a sense of humor. She wanted $250 a month. I bargained for $225 and got her to throw in some pots, pans and dishes. I move in tomorrow and start cleaning. It'll do. I'm happy.

I might have rented the place on my own. It was recommended by someone on the Mexico Connect BBS, and I would have called there if Ruben hadn't shown up. He had not found anything better than the first place we looked at on Saturday. We were headed to find the la senora who showed it to us, to see if it was still available, when I remembered the RV park recommendation. I told Ruben about it, and said that I figured it would cost too much, because an RV site typically costs $10 per night. Ruben said, well let's look at it anyway, and we drove over there. The place was pretty, once.

Rosie's son emerged from somewhere after we had tried several doors and had done some shouting. He carries his upper body stiffly, as though he has Parkinson's disease, and it was from him that we learned of his father's death. He showed us a couple of the apartments that were available, meaning they weren't filled with junk or damaged beyond repair, but those he showed us were untenable. Then Rosie showed up and showed us the best one, which I rented.

So Ruben is still a candidate for beatification. When he dropped me at the hotel, I asked if I could take him and his girlfriend out to dinner, and he said sure, and he asked if he could visit at the campground, and I said sure. I'll call him manana.

December 17

I must ask Ruben where he bought his bicycle, and get him a present. No restaurants open this Sunday morning, so I bought tortillas, canned refritos, and cheese and picnicked in my room.

December 16

The man at the front desk here is 62 and rides a bicycle for sport. He too has as much English as I have Spanish, but he hasn't been able to help me in my quest for a place to live. Maybe he didn't understand me when I asked him the day I checked in. I'll try again.

I will also check out all the websites listed in The People's Guide to Mexico, including their own. I'm not getting anywhere by looking for "se renta" signs. But I am seeing neighborhoods that I would like to live in. There looks to be a mixture of housing for the wealthy and the poor in them, but not to the extremes one could imagine. But I will need help from someone who can speak Spanish.

I'm three pages into El Viejo y el Mar, underlining every word I have to look up and filling the margins with their one-word definitions. I have to guess at some, maybe most, of the grammar, but it is making sense. The book, new, cost $3.60, and the translator isn't named; I suspect that it is a very bad translation, but I'm still getting some of the feel of Hemingway from it.

After I entered the above I went to the library and looked at those websites, and a few more, and got nowhere. I had seen them all, or ninety five percent of them, and they were of no more use now that then, including the new ones. So I posted a message-in-a-bottle on the Mexico Connect bulletin board, and despondently returned to the hotel. I wrote down a couple of sentences in Spanish and recited them to the desk clerk, who called the Tamaulipas Office of Tourism, and put me on the phone with a woman who spoke no English. She got the hotel phone number from me, somehow, and said that someone would call me back.

Nobody called me back, but at 2:40 Ruben Valero came to the hotel and asked for me. He is a man in his thirties, who works for the Oficina de Turismo, and his English is adequate. He began with a spiel about the attractions of Tamaulipas, asking what my interests were, and I said bicycling, which is one of his interests as well. I interrupted the sales pitch and told him that I simply needed help in finding a place to live. He suggested a cabin out of town, and I said that would be OK as long it had electricity, hot water and a kitchen and cost no more than 3,000 pesos per month. Ruben, and his girlfriend, spent the next three hours with me, driving me way the hell up in the mountains, where there was a cheap cabin that we never looked at because I would have to hitch a ride once a week into Victoria for groceries and email, and I'm too old for that.

The mountains are wonderful, and there are ranchitos in them that are what the rest of us should be living in, and ruins of old haciendas that looked a lot like the ruins of the Franciscan missions in New Mexico. We met along the way some of Ruben's mountain-biking buddies, two of whom are the local champions, of which one was selling oranges on the side of the road. He gave us a bag of mandarins. Ruben was on his cell phone half the time, and drove like Erin thinks I do. His speech is peppered liberally with chingas and cabrons. I kept asking him if he really wanted to spend this much time, and he said no, it was his job, don't worry. His girlfriend is very cute and much younger that he, and spoke very little English.

When we got back to Victoria he took me to the neighborhood I had been looking at, where he knew a lady who rents rooms. A "room" here is a kitchen-living room, a bedroom and a bath, furnished, with utensils. She showed us one, which was much like the places I rented as a student, and smelled of mold, and was dark and depressing, and was one of eight in a barren compound. It would cost about 2,500 pesos per month. I liked the terms, and the lady, who said I should teach English, and I said I would if she would teach me Spanish, but I didn't like that moldy smell. We drove to another place, in another neighborhood, but we didn't look at that one because there were soldiers living there and Ruben says to stay away from soldiers and cops. He told me about a good restaurant near the hotel, and said he would look through the Sunday classifieds for other rooms, and I still have an option on the first one until noon tomorrow. Ruben can see " se renta" signs much better than I can, and he called a couple more places, but they wanted $2,500 unfurnished and the tenant pays the electric. He gave me his cell and office numbers and said he would call tomorrow. Ruben is a fucking saint.

December 12

I made it to Victoria. I'm in an expensive motel ($53US) which I chose because I was exhausted and I hurt and it is across the street from a super market, where I got a six-pack of Carta Blanca and more supper than I could eat for $8. That was two hours ago, at 2:30. I would ride the remaining 4km to the center of town, but I've started my third Carta Blanca and I don't ride drunk. I don't have to get out of here until 1:00 tomorrow, so I'll look for a cheaper hotel in the morning. And then find an apartment or a house, cheap. And then lay back and wax fat.

I let this be a bitch of a day, in being anxious to get here. The end of the ride is the most anxiety ridden. First, the distance was great, given my condition. Second, nobody in Jimenez wanted anything to do with me, so I didn't learn anything about the terrain. Third, early on I encountered steep hills and headwinds that loaded me down to 6 kmph. Fourth, there was fog thick enough to obscure all but the bottom 20 feet of a microwave tower from fifty meters. Fifth, I was convinced three quarters of the time that the BOB tire was going flat. Sixth, I didn't see a restaurant that appealed to me, so I ate the little food I had left in my kitchen, which wasn't enough. Sixth, while the scenery, once the fog lifted, remained wonderful, the roadside in a lot of places smelled like shit. Literally. By the time that I knew that I could do this final leg I hurt so bad that I didn't want to see another car, truck, stinky farm or messy tire vulcanizing shop (there are hundreds, and thousands of retreads on the side of the road).

But at one point when the sky cleared and I was at the top of a mesa similar to the one I climbed onto yesterday, I took more pictures of those now not so distant mountains. Victoria is at the foot of another, similar range. I rode the last thirty km over a straight,

level road that took me into this town which sits at the base of spectacularly rugged mountains. "Sierra" is no exaggeration. Other than the stench of an open sewer now and again, and the profusion of shops dealing with cars, I think I'm gonna like it here. A stranger in a strange land, for the first time since 1961, and that was a long time ago. I took a half hour walk towards the center of town (el centro), which in my current condition didn't get me very far. But I did get into a working class residential neighborhood which was a couple of blocks from a street busy with 5:00 o'clock traffic.

It was quiet there, too quiet. The houses are built with the same fortress architecture used in old Santa Fe: high walls adjacent to the narrow sidewalk on the narrow street, with eight-foot iron gates giving access to small courtyards. Inviting, but insular.

December 11

I'm 66 and I still felt like Gary Cooper riding into a small town in the Old West when I rode into Jimenez early in this hot and dusty afternoon. Put glasses and a cheap bicycle helmet on Gary Cooper and he would look like a nerd too. Dogs chasing me, but desultorily, they were too old and too fat and it was too hot. I got friendly greetings from respectable men as I rode along toward el centro, where I expected to find el Hotel Los Reyes. The narrow street I rode on, became flanked on both sides by buildings with common walls separated from the street by a narrow sidewalk as I got further into the town. That street formed the western side of the plaza, and at its corner of the plaza on the northern side was a two story, perhaps adobe, building that reminded me of La Fonda in Santa Fe. But Jimenez is much poorer and more rectilinear. Rather than ask one of the respectable men I had passed where I could find the Hotel Los Reyes, I asked a plump fellow in need of a shave who was standing on the southwestern corner pf the plaza and he didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. But some teenagers caddy-corner from us, among the twenty or so people at the Tranzpais bus stop, must have been listening, because they shouted, "Rey! Rey!" and pointed further down the street.

In three blocks I was nearly out of town, and hadn't seen a hotel. I rode another 300m to a gas station, and as I was parking my bike a car full of teenagers pulled up, and told me my friend just rode out of town ahead of me. I suspect his name is Ray. I bought a soda, had an embarrassing moment due to my inability to add in Spanish, and asked the patient attendant if there was a hotel or motel nearby. He said yes, about a mile up the road. It was less than 200 meters, the Motel Govi, clean, attractive, comfortable, and Spartan for $25. There's a restaurant here, and a Mini-Super which sells beer, which I hope will be cold.

Speaking of restaurants, I stopped at one of the hundreds on the highway at noon. I had to force myself, because I am at heart my Momma's little boy who is afraid of dark and dirty places and people. I had seen two new eighteen-wheelers pull into the place, and I figured that either somebody was related to the proprietors or they knew it was a good place to eat. One of the truck drivers acted like he was on speed. He asked me a lot of questions, loudly and animatedly, and told me a lot of stuff, and I told him, or think I did, some of what he wanted to know and some things that he couldn't figure out either. The other driver, who had been outside, was quieter and a lot more laid back. He spoke about as much English as I do Spanish (and that seems to be the best way, for me, to communicate) and I learned that Jimenez was 40 km away, up the next hill, one curve, another curve, and downhill for 25 km into town.

At the top of that hill, which took me twenty minutes to climb, was a military police checkpoint, which southbound traffic could ignore, and another heart wrenching view of the Sierras. I was on the top of one of the mesas I had seen yesterday, and from here the mountains were closer, but still distant. I feel about them what many have felt, and recorded, in their first encounter, coming from the east, with the Front Range of the Rockies: awe, love, and a little fear towards the majesty of the Earth.

And that truly was a mesa, the land for the next fifteen or more km seemingly as flat as its namesake. Walk it and you will think differently, just as cyclists can tell you that Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa are very hilly.

I saw something disturbing this morning. A car stopped 500 meters ahead of me, and I could see doors opening and people getting out, and then back in, and doors closing, and I figured there was a change of drivers. But one person remained when the car drove away. They had stopped a little past an intersection, so I then figured that the remaining person had been hitch hiking, and I could see that he was carrying a pack or bag. But he was walking up the road, away from the intersection, in the direction of the car. As I got closer I could see that he was scavenging from the roadside trash, and when I was about 35 meters away he picked up a Coca-Cola bottle and drank from it, and then sat down on the blanket that I had mistaken for a pack and stared fixedly at the center of the road. I looked him in the eye (his were clear) and said "Buenos dias" as I rode by, and he answered with a clear "Buenos dias". It had come to me last night as I lay half asleep, worried about the kind of food I might find today, that there are million of women in this world and in the northern half of this continent, who have children and no food and no money. I will not make any excuses for not stopping to help that man. I had a little food and water and money that I could have given him. I was afraid of him, but that's no excuse.

December 10

Today I feel I am in Mexico. Alone. Rode through a countryside much like a lot of the deep south - huge farms and small houses along the road. Lots of dogs coming out of their yards to bark at me, muddy driveways, dilapidated buildings, and tiny "Mini-super"s with Corona Extra signs on them.

There are bus stops every five kilometers or so, and I rested at one of them. A young man was leading a horse along the ditch, watching me, and when he had put the horse in a corral he came over, and asked, in English, where I was going. His English was very good, and I told him so; he said he learned from watching cartoons with his cousin. He was very friendly, and we talked a few minutes, mostly about where I had come from and how long I had been on the road. He comes from Michoacan.

The weather was cool and cloudy, but dry, and I made pretty good time. At about 1:30 the sky cleared and I came to the top of a hill and saw Mexico for the first time. To the east was the Sierra de San Carlos, and to the southeast the Mesa de Solis. Real mesas. Blue in the distance. At once there were no more huge farms, but grassland that might belong to large ranches. The roadside, an the narrow, shoulder less 10km stretch into San Fernando, was messier with trash and puddles, and the homesteads were closer together, and there were just as many dogs or more, but the yards were clean and fenced with an effort, usually successful, to make them attractive. A fellow, a passenger in a ½ ton truck, yelled something at me when he passed, and then the truck stopped 200 m up the road and he got out and waited for me. He was drunk, and a little threatening, but we talked, again about where I was going. He too spoke English, a little, and when I told him I was going the San Fernando and the Victoria in a couple of days he asked if I had primos there. We shook hands, movement style, several times and he cautioned me to be careful.

San Fernando is a good-sized town. Not as big, according to the maps as Valle Hermoso, but it feels bigger, and more like a town. I wandered around a little, looking for a hotel and getting misdirected and stared at, and yelled at some more. Narrow streets with houses and shops with common walls between them, lots of tequilleras and taquerias, and a big cathedral with domed bell towers. A guy riding in a van that drove beside me for 50 meters or so wanted to talk, and he told me about the Hotel American, where I am typing this, in a room worse than the one I stayed in at the Hotel Canada in Valle Hermosa. And this one cost me ten pesos more but is still cheaper than most of the campgrounds I've stayed in, but it has a shower and a sink and a toilet and a bed, and a radio playing Mexican music in the lobby right next door. I need to get to a restaurant, and I'm a little, just a little, leery of leaving my stuff (especially this machine) here and of going out.

December 9

Tomorrow I will ride on to San Fernando. In checking her email, Sasha learned that she is not supposed to be out of Canada while drawing E.I.. So she is going home. And I will continue, alone. Having found someone to travel with who is fluent in Spanish, and is a good companion, and then to lose that companion after two days, is heart wrenching, and scary. But I have been able to buy groceries and a new inner tube for the BOB, and get a new tire pump, and get air in the tire, and buy beer. As soon as I finish this I'll try getting some lunch in the café across the street.

Valle Hermoso is full of small shops that are full of things I don't need or want. And its sidewalks are full of people who don't pay me any but minimal and polite attention. No hostility toward the gringo in their midst. There were three guys in the small, dark and dirty bike shop where I bought the tube, and they treated me well, asking where I was from and did I speak French. I should have told them I rode a bike down here.

The weather is supposed to clear this afternoon and stay clear and warm the next four days. I'm thinking of staying two nights in San Fernando, if there is a hotel as cheap and good as this one, and taking a side trip to Carboneras, on the Gulf. Then two days to Cd. Victoria, spending a night in Santander Jimenez.

December 8

We are in the Hotel Canada, in $19 rooms. Valle Hermoso is a lot like Contol, only much bigger. We got our laundry done and had lunch - my first bowl of menudo in 35 years. Had to repair the BOB tire again, and now my pump doesn't work right. The weather is cool, cold for here, and there are intermittent showers. Arnulfo says that the people who live in the towns and villages between here and Cd. Victoria will be good to us, and if we can't find a hotel where we need to stop, that a family will be willing to put us up. Sasha went to an internet café, and I am venturing out to buy some groceries.

Tomorrow we ride on, to San Fernando, the gods willing.

December 7

A day to remember. Footage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on the motel's TV at 6:00 AM. Met Sasha at 7:45 and we were riding south by 8:00. Got to Harlingen by 10:30. Los Indios at 11:15, and had cleared Mexican immigration and started for Valle Hermoso at 11:55, in light rain and a good strong tailwind. It was 40 km away; a piece of cake. About five km down the road, pedaling at 20 kmh, I hit something slick, dropped the bike and skidded about three meters on my left side. Then Sasha ran over me, and she, too, fell. I got skinned up, and was bleeding profusely from cuts on my face and leg, and my shoulder hurt, but I was otherwise all right. Sasha was unscathed except for a headache: she landed on her helmet.

We decided that because of the traffic, particularly trucks sending up clouds of mist that reduced visibility to zero, we should find a hotel. Sasha walked about fifty meters up the road to a farmhouse to ask directions, and while she was there two Mexican border policemen in a ½ ton truck stopped to investigate. Because I was covered with blood they thought I was badly hurt, and asked where I wanted to go, and I said Valle Hermoso and they said something else, and I said my amiga over there speaks Spanish, and Sasha came back about then. Sasha is fluent in Spanish. They were telling me that they were taking us to a hotel, and we had a choice of one 2km back or another 8 km down the road and 3 km to the west. We chose the later, and I broke my vow not to use fossil fuel for transportation on this trip (ferries notwithstanding). One of the cops, the driver, who had done all the talking, had been drinking. I seriously did not expect to survive that ride.

The hotel they brought us to is in a little town called Control. Lots of junk, in and out of yards, cattle and skinny dogs in the streets, little bars, taquerias, farmacias, small shops selling fish or bread or meat, a messy, muddy place, with a lot of well-mannered schoolchildren and men who greeted us politely. Arnulfo and Mila, in their early fifties, own and manage the hotel and its store. They charged us $25 per room, helped carry our gear upstairs, stored our bikes and the BOB in a shed, and Mila drove us to a café for some lunch, which consisted of three things that I think of as open-faced tamales. Then I had a shower and cleaned off the blood (I did look pretty bad), applied first aid. Later, when Sasha went over to the bakery, Mila told her that I would be welcome to have tacos with them, which I did. I used as much of my very bad Spanish as I could, and they and the tacos were very good for me.

I'm warm, I'm fed, my injuries won't keep me from riding, I'm among people who care for me, and I think they sell beer in the tienda downstairs.

They do. I bought, after some confusion, what I had seen, from the hotel balcony, other men carrying away in brown bags: a liter of Schaefer, a Milwaukee beer. Tomorrow more rain is predicted. For $30 Arnulfo will drive us to Valle Hermoso.

December 6

The 65 miles turned out to be 75. My rear fender was scraping against the tire, and in trying to adjust it I broke one of its struts, so I had to remove it, which took 45 minutes. By that time a 10mph headwind had come up, against which I was struggling harder and harder, until I stopped and discovered that the BOB tire was going flat again. There is a beautiful rest area on the highway, where I stopped to wash the grease off my hands and arms, with Mexican tile in the bathrooms, which I could see through the locked door. Not an idyllic day, but it had its moments. The country is incredibly beautiful.

December 5

I did not mention that Geoff, the anarchist from Winnipeg with whom I rode six days ago, was going to Austin to try to patch things up with a girl named Sasha. They had ridden together, in a group of seven or eight, from Winnipeg to New Orleans. According to Geoff she had fallen in love with him, but not vice versa, which created tension, and when Geoff fell in love with a girl in New Orleans, Sasha split from the group and rode to Austin on her own. Today I met Sasha.

Sasha is a Haligonian, a student and a member of the staff at NSCAD. She has ridden down here (Kingsville, Texas) from Austin, still on her own. She was at a visitor's information center where I stopped to find out how far it is from here to Raymondville. She's going to Ciudad Victoria, and she speaks Spanish. We will meet up in Raymondville and ride together into Mexico. Now what kind of karma is that?

I had been wondering this morning why Texans would name a place "Kingsville". There would never have been any admissible loyalty to any monarchy at any time in Texas history since gringos began naming places. At the visitor's center, where besides meeting Sasha and fixing another flat tire on the BOB, I learned that Kingsville is named for the founder of the King Ranch, which was known in my youth as the largest ranch in the world. More than 800,000 acres now. The reason there is such a long uninhabited stretch (65 miles) between here and Raymondville is that the road runs through the King Ranch.

December 4

I think I have cold feet. I'm wasting time in Corpus Christi, on the pretext of needing work done on my bike (work that I know how, and am equipped to do) and getting a copy of the Guia Roji (an excellent road map) for Tamaulipas. I called a couple of travel agents to see if I could book passage on a freighter from here to Tampico. Not possible. So to hell with it: tomorrow I'll take the big plunge, and in three days I'll be in Valle Hermosa. From there to Ciudad Victoria in about four more days. And then quien sabe? Maybe I'll stay there. I'm truly sick of travel.

I haven't been in many large cities on this trip. Poughkeepsie, Richmond, Baltimore, Washington, and Baton Rouge, and now Corpus Christi. Corpus seems to be a friendly, funky place. Lots of Hispanics, and lots of Gringos speaking Spanish. ( I had breakfast in a Mexican restaurant in Stinton this morning, with a Viet Nam vet who invited me to his table. His Spanish, when he patronized the waitress, was limited to about a six words and was atrocious.) Take New Minas, add a couple of refineries, abuse and do not repair the infrastructure, and you would have Corpus. Glad to see a city in overly proud Texas that is as messy, and perhaps as interesting, as New York.

I mourn the loss of my kitchen cover, which Erin designed and sewed for me. My kitchen is a milk crate tied onto the rear cargo rack of my bike. The bright orange cover shows up beautifully in the first few pictures I took, and in a sad, faded and torn state about three weeks ago, in the picture of the bike leaning against the Highway Sixty One sign. One of the reasons it got into such bad condition is that I kept it tied down with a bungee cord, which kept constant stress on the corner seams. I repaired it with Gorilla Tape somewhere in western Louisiana, and then, in order not to stress it further, I quit tying it down. That made it much easier to get at my kitchen, and for two days, riding into headwinds some of the time, and over some rough roads, everything was fine. The next day I stopped at a highway intersection to eat an orange. When I got to the next town, about ten miles away, it was gone. I think I took it off and laid it on the trailer, and then rode away without putting it back on the kitchen. It has gone to the limbo of lost objects, along with my sunglasses, a soap case, and my shoe covers, which is another reason I have cold feet.

December 3

These days get almost boring, which is a good thing. Cloudy, windy and cold again, but flat country, and tail winds. Rode fifty-five miles in less than five hours. Would have made it to Corpus Christi - I'm only thirty miles away - but I need to rest my bum. The country between Goliad and Refugio is what I expected of Texas: a level plain to the horizon in all directions, covered with mesquite. No human habitation in sight, only a few, very few, structures serving the petroleum industry. Hardly any traffic on the road; by myself out there, with the cattle and birds. A good feeling, one I haven't had for a long time. The drive from Abo to Belen, coming down from the Manzano Mountains and looking over the northern end of the Jornada del Muerto invariably gave me that feeling. I feel somehow a participant in that seeming emptiness, knowing that if I walked through it I would not find it empty, for all its vastness.

December 2

Another uneventful day, except that I rode too far, and my rear was sore, and my legs hurting, at the end of it. I stopped in Goliad, a town of 2k or so. These small towns are old west Texan, but I doubt there were so many antique dealers and hairdressers, and so few saloons, in the Old West. Landed in a Budget ($38) Inn. The country is getting drier, and the yards messier.

December 1

Decided yesterday to try for Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz. Roy Dudley, of Mexicoconnect has convinced me. It's a city of 600,000, the capital of Veracruz, and a jalapeno is one from there. An uneventful ride from Brenham to Flatonia. Long hills, but not very steep, both up and down. The country is opening up, lots of cattle grazing on good grass, fewer trees and not so tall along the river and creek banks.