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2015-11-21 tl;dr: The day was spent on truck-heavy highways as I make my way inland in Mexico. I happen to see the weather back home as I was looking at a website. 28 degrees. Hey, it's the same temperature there as here!I knew today was going to be spent on highways, but it was still horrible. There is a local highway that runs along side a toll road. Of course I took the local highway. I should have asked if I could take the toll road, because apparently every trucker in Mexico is too cheap to take the toll road. Fortunately, Mexicans are crazy good at dodging. If there were a dodgeball tournament between Mexico and the USA, Mexico would destroy the USA. The road is wide enough for cars and taxis to pass me easily. Trucks tend to give me as much space as they possibly can. Buses...I hate buses. My head phones broke. I guess I yanked on them one too many times. I decided I may need to just listen to passing trucks for a few days until I got to another big city or got lucky in a small town. Then I came across a Coppel in the middle of nowhere. It is kind of like a Target. I found some headphones (which were in a display case). A salesman wrote down the SKU and lead me to a desk where I assumed I'd pay while he fetched the headphones. Of course it couldn't be so simple. I had the cash, but the cashier wouldn't take it until they found somebody who spoke English and explained that I would pay here and receive my headphones at another desk by the original salesman who had gone to fetch them for me in the first place. It would not have been hard to gesture these steps. It would have been equally as easy for the salesman to just return to me with the headphones just to get the stupid gringo out of the store. I am learning that Mexicans are not very creative. It seems like I spent most of the day climbing. I'm headed inland now. Cars and taxis use their horns liberally to announce their presence. People in Mexico tend to whistle a lot, but the habit seems more prevalent in this area. A short whistle seems to mean, "I acknowledge your presence." A longer or double-whistle seems to mean, "I acknowledge your presence with some interest." People here also wave with their arms down and palms up. Back home this means, "what the frig?" Here it just means, "hello." I hope. The end of the day found me in a cow pasture setting up my tent. I could probably have biked longer, but the trucks were getting obnoxious. |
 biking into hill country  crossing this bridge was not fun  oil refinery  all these coins look the same to me  Burger King menu  speed bump market  spent the day on roads like this  road side horse     iguanas  some random mound |