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Published: March 31st 2009
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March 25, Wednesday
This was a non-travel day for us. We slept a bit later than normal, had a "deseyuna continental" at the semi-attached restaurant, consisting of a huge plate of cut up mango, watermelon, and cantaloupe, plus toast and coffee. This would have cost us minimum $6.99 in the US of A. We’ve found that the food is very inexpensive as compared to US prices. Coffee is almost always 10 pesos, which at the present time is 70 cents. Our standard currency exchange factoring consists of 1. multiply pesos times 7 for USD - actually US cents, but it’s not hard to figure out the proper decimal spot. 2. multiply $1.00 times 14 to get pesos. I know... how can 14 times 7 equal 100 ? Actually it’s 98, but I figure that the 2 cents is okay to ignore either direction.
Lots of reading, sitting in the sunny courtyard, work on the computer, more reading and general lollygagging around followed by wandering through town, poking our noses in all the shops, and learning some more rudimentary Spanish by practicing on the shopkeepers and looking in our phrase book constantly. At this point we’ve found very few -
meaning 3 folks that speak English to any real extent. The guy at immigration, a younger man on a Suzuki GSXR 600 in Rodriquez who works in Houston TX, and Roxanne.
March 26, Thursday
After taking advantage of another yummy fruit plate breakfast, we hopped aboard Bear and rolled away towards Paras de la Fuente. This town had been spoken well of by Roberto as a Government project - a “typical” Mexican town that had been set up for tourists etc. We rode through scrub desert bisectted by a few mountain chains, very pretty but not outstanding. My chief concern after about 20 kilometers was whether I had enough gas to get to the next town. Lots of figuring in my head from gallons to liters and from miles to kilometers and back again, I finally decided that we would “probably” make it okay. 179 kilometers later, we did, as the Pemex station was right on the closer edge of town. I think I had about another 20 miles left in the tank, so we weren’t quite on fumes, but I’ve resolved to not run it that close again. Paras de la Fuente is not nearly as nice as Quatro Cienegas. It is larger, and has two plazas, but I was surprised at the run down condition of much of the town away from the zona central. We stopped at the plaza with a small church to look around. We had been given two Hotel names to find, but we were thinking we’d rather camp, so around we wandered hoping to find someone that knew something about camping in the area. Unfortunately, the phrases for camping in our book don’t seem to make any sense to the man on the street, even when we show him the Spanish words in the book. I guess that either this part of the book is more for Spain, or the locals just don’t have any idea what “camping” is. We finally found our way to Bernardo, who is in charge of tourism for the town. He told us there was no camping anywhere around, though he checked with his family and invited us to set our tent up in his “yard”. I don’t know if he was talking about a little house, or possibly a huge ranchero outside of town somewhere, but we felt a little uncomfortable with this arrangement, so we asked about the two hotels. He told us where they were, and that they were asking 800 pesos por la noche--- 7x8 equals $56 a night. Carumba ! We settled for the much smaller, though still clean, Hotel La Siesta for 400 pesos. ($28) They even let me drive my bike through the office and into the small courtyard again. The room was tiny but it certainly served it’s purpose. We had supper at the bus station restaurant, and took a short walk around the area.
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