It took us two days to get to Guanajuato because we were held up in Aguascalientes. No, not that kind of hold up.
The kind of holdup every motorcyclist loves to run into. A fellow motorcycle enthusiast that can't get enough of your story. Duro spotted us on the 6 lane autopista (freeway) running straight into Aguascalientes. We stopped and chatted for a couple of minutes about our trip, and his interest in taking smaller motorcycle trips, and we were hoping he could point us in a good direction for some lunch. It was about three in the afternoon and we were both starving.
He then noticed that we were burning oil on the right side exhaust pipes. I tried to explain to him that I was constantly watching the oil, and that I knew what the problem was, and that I was in the midst of resolving the issue. Which is our cam chain tensioner not holding tension and leaking a fair bit of oil past the seal. Well, instead of pointing us to a good restaurant for lunch, (we finally made it to the Birria market that I was dreaming of before we left the next day.)
The back of a lamb on the table in front of us.
Pretty good Birria cook. Side note, Birria is a specialty of Northern Mexico where lamb, mutton and goats are raised. The best place to get Birria is in Aguascalientes, so stop right here.
Eat and watch your bike at the Juarez Market.
Back to the story, We got the Birria information later that night when we meet up with Duro and his wife, and got a tour of the city. But, the first place Duro took us to was the infamous motorcycle garage of the Maestro Jorge Venegas Estrada.
We discussed the issue with my motor, and he offered up a quick solution. drill out the old bolt on the cam chain tensioner so we could thread in a stud bolt. This was a good option, but I knew if we made one mistake Jen and I would be stuck in Aguascalientes for much longer than we wished to visit this uber modern city. Mind the Birria market. I chose to talk my way out of the situation, and I learned a good lesson. Even if the mechanic you are talking to about a problem wants to do the work for free, it doesn't mean it is always the best decision.
So to fill you in on why we decided to pass on the offer, I have found a used cam chain tensioner on eBay for seven bucks. This includes the cam chain and the guides. Not a bad deal.
So we get the tour of the town that night by Duro. Auguascalientes is one of the highlights on the Mexico bull fighting circuit. Some of the best bulls in the country are breed here and killed here. We also got to see a Marilyn Monroe impersonator, sorry no photos I forgot the camera, she was standing over a grate in a section of town that had the cars passing underground. When a car would pass underneath her, the viewers would get a little glimpse as she posed innocently for the photos.
The next day I got up early, to check the condition of the bike, oil, and cam chain tensioner. I had to add a bit of oil, but that was expected. We then took off for a visit to the National Museum of death.
Click on our pictures for more great photos from the Death Museum.
So here we are in Guanajuato. I again have the engine out, and I am getting the broken bolt on our cam chain tensioner fixed temporarily as our new tensioner gets shipped to us.
I am going to replace our original one, because I also want to replace our head gasket, the oil seal around the cam chain tensioner bolt, and put in a master link on the cam chain. Plus in the care package with these parts from the states will be a new electric starter motor for the bike. Lets hope all goes well.
Benjamin
One of the reasons that this blog didn't start up until Ben and I realized we were just disappointing our future selves by not documenting this trip, is because I have a really difficult time with negotiating my liberal arts degree of 'critical kindness' towards all things new, different or unique; and my desire to write out, document and share my love of small handmade and hand delivered stories to other human beings.
To casually display the fight against the existentialist struggle.
I told our host, Gaby, in Monterrey, that I was working in my head on my 'What I Am Going to Say About Mexico That is Honest, Not Stereotyping; Kind, But Critical.' This is part of that series of thoughts.
Today, via my college email address, I received a bulk-letter from one of the administrative bigwigs at Tulane, my alma mater, telling students to use caution, and check the state.gov website for travel information about going to major Mexican tourist areas and the Mexican frontera. Drugs, death, violence, pickpockets and rape! Frankly, short of Tijuana, all of the cities listed on the website seemed charming compared to New Orleans, New York City, Chicago, and sure as heck better than Gary, Indiana. What are we (Americans) telling ourselves about the outside world? Are we writing these blurbs about our most dangerous cities, when all of those out-of-state college students just showed up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year?
...
Right now, Ben has the whole darned motorcycle apart, up the street (Carlos and Nasul's house is located on the hillside, and the immediate surrounding blocks are pedestrian stairwells only, paved with large stones held together by cement and loosely attached, somehow, to the mountain), so we haven't been driving anywhere for the last couple of days.
Therefore, every few days we walk down to the markets and go to buy groceries. Zacatecas is an old town, and it is difficult to build modern day grocery stores into the city--there are no streets that run straight and buildings, stairwells too, tend to just pop out of nowhere, built on top of other buildings, buildings that are dug into the sides of the mountains surrounding the main valley of the city.
These markets tend to be mixed results for us--sometimes three days of delicious groceries or an incredible lunch comes for less than three dollars (or 45 pesos). Other times, we are ripped off--less than a pound of rice for 20 pesos, or a $1.33. This may not seem like a lot, and in a way, it isn't, either economically or emotionally. But in some ways, it is. We watch and listen, as we get ripped off by someone--we know whats going on and they know that we know. Everyone is clearly aware. What we're paying for is more than just some white rice, we're paying for years of bad blood between two countries, for a child's education, our stilted Spanish, for our blue eyes. In this is the critical kindness. I don't blame this individual for overcharging me, and I let him do it, willingly. It is easy enough to say no. But it doesn't help him if I say no, and it doesn't help me if I say yes. Overall, no one is winning in any of these situations. How do you call someone out on this without skirting around the obvious reasons that you are being ripped off?
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One night, my friend Anna and I were waiting for the streetcar in New Orleans. A woman came up to us and asked us for money for a cab. Her boyfriend had just beat her up and kicked her out of the car. We gave her everything we had short of the small fare for the streetcar back Uptown--did we want to be scammed and do the right thing or not give her money and possibly let this woman try to walk home by herself in the middle of the night?
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It makes me really nervous to fall into the travel blog/travel writing hole of essentializing groups of people and blaming them for historic, political and social events outside of their reach, or summing them up into quaint exoticized moments in my life. These stories may seem negative, but they're really about the difficulty of walking a fine line between forgiving, comprehending, and criticizing. How do you humanize a person, a place or a country without generalizing or being unfair (in either a good or bad way)? How do you write a story about something without taking advantage of the person who made the story--the climb up the hill or the noteworthy news?
...
I spend a lot of time, looking at the florae and the terrain on our trips. A lot of the time on the motorcycle is spent between towns; it makes the metropolitan area from New York to Boston seem claustrophobic. It is hard to catch pictures of plants while we're moving,
most of the on-motorcycle pictures tend to be of distant objects (ok, mountains).
So I've been trying to take pictures of interesting plants more often,
so that I can show at least what some of the plants are like, the more "exotic" ones that catch my eye.
I wish I could give names for these plants, but you'll just have to appreciate them for what they are. Included are some photos of the mountains I've loved, too. Just so you can start to feel the expansiveness of Mexico, the rolling desert plains and mountains we've been travelling through since we left the United States.
We had to slow down for these sheep. I would say that half of the animals we've seen have not been penned in. But they tend to be a little smarter, the cows, the horses, the chickens, etc. and they realize that there is no food to be found on the road.
I actually was able to catch a picture of one of small dust whirlwinds that suck up the dry ground. Everytime we crest a mountain, there are dozens of these to be seen on the horizon:
Grapevines in the desert for Ryan:
Hey dudes and dudettes!
I have a question and a psuedo-PSA and a mini-PSA:
Question: Do you have any ideas of how I could better advertise this blog? Specific forums, ideas on advertising, people we could contact? I am a little stumped as to who to reach out to right now.
Reason/Psuedo-PSA: Ben and I make a pittance via advertisements that are (hopefully) not super intrusive and occasionally from donations from really awesome people (who are probably afraid we would start eating cactus and coyote roadkill if they didn't throw us some money). So the more people who read this occasionally or regularly, the more money we get.
This is good, because it means that we can do this a bit longer and that we can do more fun things, because everyday we have to decide on whether we want to have one more tank of gas, or if we buy the part that we desperately need so that the motorcycle doesn't explode on us. We are not King Solomon, you know??
It also means that we make more friends because then folks are like 'Hey these guys might be cool I should meet them' and then we have more things to write about and everyone wins. Oh, and if you have a really rich uncle who likes sponsoring hardworking crazy kids like us, give us his contact info.
Mini-PSA: Also! Please don't forget that if you like us, you should link us! We will link you back!
And! Please check out our photo albums at: http://picasaweb.google.com/jenandtheart We are very diligent about trying to keep them organized and up-to-date! Not all of the great photos that we have show up in the blog! We also try to keep our latest photos rotating in the slideshow to the left.
And! We now are posting videos because I became brave over at: http://www.youtube.com/user/jenandtheart If you have a youtube account, you should rate them like one bazillion percent so that other people will see them too, and so that we can maybe one day beat out all the Miley Cyrus videos that show up on youtube.
Ok. That is all. Thank you. I am working on getting our videos up from Mardi Gras in San Luis Potosi, and once that happens, I will post a blog about it.
Love, Jen
Mission, Texas has become our new home. The neighbor children are no longer afraid when I say "Hi" to them. The apartment maintenance guys always wave as they cruise along in their golf carts on their way to fix something or another. Like Galveston, we seem to be getting some friends around here, and have probably been here for a little bit too long. That's why I was so surprised when low and behold, I saw some unexpected bleachers on the side of the road. However close I feel to this community, I am out of the loop. Something big was about to happen, and I was just catching wind of it. Something was going on this weekend. Jen had overheard the barista in town talking about a parade that she would be working. My curiosity was piqued when I learned that there was going to be a parade. A parade for whom, for what, where, and most importantly when. Since my time in New Orleans, parades have taken on a new meaning. When I learned the parade was for the Texas Citrus Fiesta, I started to imagine the armloads of grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and who knows what else that would be thrown from floats decorated in the aforementioned fruits. That however, would be indicative of a New Orleans style parade. The main event for the Texas Citrus Fiesta would be Saturday evening. At seven p.m. sharp, the floats, bands, queens and kings, princesses, and military regiments would parade through town. We arrived a little early so we could sample some of the local fare like: Hot Cheetos with nacho sauce.
 Some of the worst barbecue I have ever had Onto the parade. The floats were decorated, but only sparingly in fruit slices. The overarching theme for the floats was Winter Texan R.V. Parkers who were honoring POW, MIA, and "the troops that gave some, and those that gave all." The first place prize winner:  Some of the princesses: Of course, motorcycles (and even in the dark you can tell they are Harleys):
 And the never ending parade of cops. Unfortunately, this is how most of my photos turned out:
  By the end of the parade, we had only caught one orange. It wasn't a hapless victim of a float either. The Pooper Scooper was filling his time in between picking up road apples by handing out fresh Texas citrus. Yum Valencia oranges, my favorite. Benjamin
We did it! We left Galveston! Some of you might have thought we would be there forever. We almost thought the same thing. In fact, we only limped out of Galveston, and forty miles from Mission, Texas, our final destination in the US, the exhaust pipes started to scream, pop, hiss, and breathe fire. However cool it may sound, we lost power due to the excitement. While in Galveston, we had been trying to eliminate some erratic behavior in the tuning of our machine. The hard starts, the loss of mid-range power, and occasional failure to start. We came to find out, when everything was said and done, all we needed was one of Jen's hair ties--well at least to help with figuring out why we were failing to start. After our last job with Tim, on the West End of the island, we couldn't get the bike to start. I figured it was just the points acting up again. I checked for a proper spark first. None. So we followed the connection back through the plug wires, and to the coils; when I got to the kill switch and hardwired it, the bike fired up and ran. So I cleaned the contacts on the switch and reassembled it to work normally. With the bike running, we buttoned her back up and started for home. Once we got on the highway, the engine cut out. I had missed something, or had I? I looped Jen's fabric rubber band over the ignition's kill switch, helping the contacts in the switch complete the circuit and transmit the necessary twelve volts to the coils. It worked again. When we got home that night, I took the switch apart, cleaned it up real good, made sure all the parts were functioning as they should, and presto, old is the new, new. Well, almost. The engine is still hard to start/won't start. Jet Ski Joe, mechanic extraordinaire, and friend of Tim, an Adventure Rider (Princess Jamaica), told me our hard starts have something to do with the scratching sound we hear when the engine is starting, and that it is an air leak. To find out where the air is leaking, he advised us to spray starter fluid around where the carburetors mount to the engine head. If the leak is around the intake valves, the extra fuel will cause a spike in the engines RPM. To check the exhaust valves we will have to hold a burning match up to where the exhaust pipes mount to the engine, and watch for any movement in the flame. This will tell what gaskets need to be remade or ordered to fix the problem. During our last days in Galveston, I bought a sort of insurance policy. New coils, four in fact. I figured we had replaced almost all the other ignition parts, short of installing an electronic ignition. Two of these coils were meant to be returned. I was able to find some car coils that were a match for the coils already on the bike and needless to say, the ones on the bike are not the right ones. So, I also bought the right Hitachi type Cm 11 coils for the bike, from MikesXS and had them shipped to Mission, Texas. My logic was that we could return the one set we picked up in Galveston when the right ones arrived and no one would be the wiser. Why the hassle? The idea was that if we did break down, and we did need the new coils between Galveston and Mission, we would have them. Guess what? It was a damn good "policy" I bought. When we broke down, I found one of our old coils was leaking oil. I think this is what caused our backfiring, but alas, when I changed them out, the problem persisted. We checked our spark, it was great; reset the timing, and fiddled with the carbs a little bit. Before we called it a night, I could get the bike to start up for about ten seconds, and then it would slowly die out. It would allow me to do this every fifteen minutes or so. So that is where we are at. Oh, and the best part. We got a ride to Mission, Texas. I wasn't sure what to say when Mike, the second person to stop and ask us if we needed help, offered to throw our bike in the back of his van. I assumed it would be too large, and too heavy, but we did it. Again, so this is where we are at. The bike runs, but only for a few seconds. Is it the carbs, or is it the valves? The engine running says to me it is not the valves, but the carbs, and the dying off to me sounds like there is blockage in one of the jets on the carbs. I guess there is only one way to find out. Pics coming tomorrow, or whenever we are at an Internet connection that will allow us to upload our pictures. Be well Be welcome Benjamin
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