Day 14 Missed appointment, GPS trouble, borders & insufferable heat

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Distance driven today: 226 miles / 364 km

Cumulative distance driven: 4,116 miles / 6,624 km (13,000 miles to go)

Today’s trip: Phoenix, Arizona to Douglas, Arizona

Schools with donated Kindle e-readers visited: 0 – the principal got a medical emergency and we had to cancel

Preparations for entering Mexico: lots

Today I was scheduled to meet with Principal Tiffnee Hurst, at the Cholla High School in Tucson, Arizona. We were going to go through the Kindle e-readers we have donated to the school. However, she had a medical family emergency, and so our meeting didn’t happen. Not much to do about such a contingency.

The southbound drive from Phoenix this morning turned out to be ridiculously hot. It’s not just the fact that the temperature got to 100F / 38C, but that the air was very dry in the desert. In fact, it got so hot that I had to make a stop every 45 min to get a drink and, at the same time, let the engine cool down a bit. It’s funny to think that just 10 days ago, when I was riding in the Yukon territory in northern Canada, it was freezing cold and practically snowing on me.

Passed Tucson, the temperature dropped (but only a little) and the humidity increased somewhat. I the afternoon I arrived in Douglas, which is the very last town in southern Arizona, before the Mexican border. The rest of the afternoon was spent with preparations from tomorrow mornings’ crossing into Mexico. I exchanged money, fueled up the bike, got all my documents prepared, and perhaps most importantly, I arranged for a Mexican vehicle insurance. It turns out that, not only is vehicle insurance mandatory for driving in Mexico, but it must also be issued by a Mexican insurance company, and be valid for the entire time that the vehicle is in Mexico. If you don’t have such insurance, the border patrol won’t let you through. Luckily for me, after asking around in Douglas, I found out that there are a couple of insurance companies that specialize in issuing such vehicle insurance for people that are bringing their car or motorcycle into Mexico.

The last thing that I did was to transfer all the necessary GPS tracks and routes for Mexico, from the mapping software on my netbook, and over on to my GPS unit on the bike. And that’s where I run into big problems. More specifically, for some mysterious reason, I kept getting an error message on the GPS unit, stating that the map on the netbook and the map on the unit weren’t the same, and therefore the routes transferred can’t be recognized by the unit. After more than an hour and a half of troubleshooting, Googling, reading forums, etc., I figured out a work-around that allows me to see and follow, on my GPS unit, the routes I will be needing in Mexico over the coming month.

From tomorrow morning and for the coming 2,5 months, all communication will be in Spanish. It’s time to brush up on my meager Spanish skills!

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