And I am off! The 2020 adventure has begun
For the moment I will blog on this page but hopefully in a day or two I will divide the material into sub pages.
This is my 5th year riding in Cancun in January. I arrived Wednesday Jan 8. Rode for the first time at 6am Thursday Jan 9 and am scheduled to leave on Wednesday Jan 22, after that days ride.
It rained today Thursday! A little as I was returning from my 6am ride, none at all during the day and a lot at 4pmish. And then really badly at night and I did not try to ride Friday morning. I did get out Saturday.
Cancun rain is very different from rain in my New Hampshire home. It sometimes spits. Fairly large drops but nothing consistent. The sky is sunny. A few drops fall. That is it, back to beach weather. But, there is another kind of rain also. The sky opens up. I could not guess inches an hour but there are lots. I bring an umbrella to Cancun. In fact I bring one on all my trips, I even brought one to China! But when the Cancun sky opens, an umbrella is worthless. You have to get under cover. Luckily there are lots of covered porches on hotels, restaurants, vacant buildings etc. You just jump into one.
On Thursday I had a 6pm reservation at Peter’s restaurant. It was raining. There seemed to be a break and I started out for the 10 minute walk. I had forgotten about the street flooding. Many side streets just turn into rivers 2-3 inches deep. They empty into the main avenues.
Have I ever told you about my shoes? I swear by some version of a brown Timberline dress shoe. I call them boats. They are litterly waterproof. I do not put anything on them, none of that grease? we used to treat our hiking boots with back in the dark ages. They just come from the store boatlike. The one problem is that they are only about 1 1/2 inches high? So when the water comes over the top, as it does in Cancun streets, then you are hosed. Water in a boat stays so you have it with you until you get home!
One more digression about the shoes! Ever heard of Planter Fasciitis? Hopefully not. You get up in the morning and you can not put any weight on your heal. The good news is that it sometimes gets better over the course of the day but it will be ready for you first thing the next morning! I tried everything: Stretching, exercises, better shoes. But then one attempt worked. I put Planter Fasciitis insoles, probably from Dr Scholls, in my timberland dress shoes and good by plangter Fasciitis! I tried the same insoles in my normal foot gear, running shoes, but no luck. So, I am a convert. Wife hates the brown dress shoe look. Or rather, she hates the brown dress shoes with my normal white socks!
I have not spent enough time looking for the right wife brown socks. They need to be heavier than the squirmy wormies of my youth. I think they are called some kind of wool. I even took a look for them at my clothier of choice, Cosco, but no luck. I should not say that. My normal clothier is the local salvation army store and I usually buy only Hawaiian shirts, jeans, fleeces and biking cloths. Anyway, once home I have to raise the priority of the wife brown socks. Paying attention to such requests is one of the few things I can do to show my affection.
But back to the rain. I had to spend 5 minutes on the porch of a deserted restaurant. It was still raining hard but I took advantage of a relative lol to move on. I had to cross the avenue so that I did not have to keep wading through the cross streets and precipitating further shoe flooding. I made it close enough to 6pm but it took a lot of navigation, reading the relative height of the terrain!
As always, an excellent meal at Peter’s. I did not really notice that my boats were as full as they where until I got home. The socks, along with being soaked, where red and brown? Where did the red come from? Anyway, washing in the sink and drying on the roof seems to have restored them to their place in the normal sock cycle.
There must be something else to write about!