I decided that the rides 11-17 page had gotten long enough and so started this new page, rides 18-24
Wednesday. This is my 8th day of riding. I always hope to get to at least 10 but am happy to have made it to 8. Tomorrow shows rain but Jorge at Elite kind of implies that you can not trust the weather and that I should show up at 5:30 and see what the situation is!
On the first days, a week ago, I did a lot of sleeping and certainly was always awaken by the 5am alarm. No idea why but now I take less of a nap after the ride in the morning and less of a nap at the after lunch 3-5 spot. I did sleep a little today around 5pm but it was fitful. The reason I got started on this thread is that I was awake a little more last night. I watched a Utube video about Cancun. I always go to bed without the snor machine and then put it on during the night when I wake up. I checked the clock at about 3 this morning and felt that my rest from 3-5 was not complete. I really did not suffer. I was asleep when the alarm went off but it was not the same completely lost sleep of earlier in the week. Funny that last week there was a LOT of party noise from a bar near by all night, even to 5am! That seems to have stopped now? Maybe my sleep likes party sound?
But back to the Wednesday ride. Everything was smooth. I checked the temperature by walking outside and decided that I could go with shorts and only 1 layer on top, That is better for laundry. I carry the hat in my shirt pocket but never even considered putting it on.
Down to the hotel road and off I go. Pirate, Surfin, no memroies of anything special. I was passed by a couple of other riders, all without chase. The notes I write down when I got to Cancun sign say one loan rider ,then 2, then Elite group who say hello. Only the Elite group have a chase. I of course recognize that van. I have to get better at recognizing he other chase cars as that is the only way to know which group is which!
I got to the Cancun sign at 6:35. The wind was bad! I especially have trouble going uphill with strong wind. I slow down. The bike has less centrifugal? force or something to hold it on a straight course. A bus comes too close. The curb on the right it too high. Welcome to my morning terror. The hill right before the Cancun sign is especially steep.
In my daily effort to record landmarks between Surfin and Cancun sign, I came up with see Farris, little yellow plaza, another little yellow,, pass Farris, concrete medallion in the median, purple sign on left, dark Harry sign at restaurant, 7/11, 2 concrete Cancum signs on right all before my stop at the normal Cancun sign bus pullout. I did have one more image from the ride out. I went slowly by a bus pulled over on the right and had the impression of a great big growling hot monster.
I headed home and made it at 7:50. I am leaning a little more about where exactly the pot hole is that gave me a flat tire on the return trip last Thursday. It is past the Empire Royal Uno hotel sign. Then a blue traffic destination sign suspended over the road, a slight jog to the left and it comes quickly. I now know there is room to go on the curb side of the obstacle. I think Elite passed me after this. No other excitement on the way home.
Thursday. The bad news is that at 5:30 it was not raining so I was in for another shop ride. There seemed to be more people than usual but not a lot. I handed in by 50 pieco tip. The exit was confused. The man yells something like “go” and we slowly each mount, ride west for 10 yards and then turn into my street. It dead ends in 200 yards and we turn right. That dead ends at the main road in 200 yards. Usually we all wait there for a break in the traffic. There is not a lot of traffic as it is 6am. Today, a first group took off to the right even though there was more traffic coming.. The rest of us went in the next traffic break but the main group had already stopped at the light, turned left and stopped at that light and were on their way to the hotel road. We caught up easily but it was a little stressful for Tom who likes things the same each day.
I got dropped early, before Pirate. I think the uneven start threw me off a little. I worked and worked. Finally as the people behind me passed me and rode away, I gave up and settled into my normal pace.. Oh well. Pirate and Surfin came right along. More riders, with and without chase than I have ever seen. Purple sign, hotel that reminds me of the Monitor Civil War battle ship. Then the green fence and 7/11. It is 6:50 and I am siting at the Cancun sign bus stop taking these notes. Then it starts to sprinkle. Just very slight. I check the radar on my phone and looks like this is just a small cloud and the real thing will come at like 2pm.
Rain does not bother bike riders in that we are usually already sweaty and in Cancun we are also more than warm. BUT wet roads are deadly. The metal dimples are slick. The rain causes the oil in the road to float up and encourage the bike to slide left orright. I put the phone away, got on the bike and headed home. I pretty much have the flat tire pothole nailed. I have to be a little careful that I do not become too complaisant, but I can pretty much go on auto piolet until the left juke in the road and the traffic blue directions overhead. Really was the best ride of the Cancun trip coming back. The rain disappeared. I was comfortable enough with the road condition and traffic to mainly think about other things. The K’s just drift away. I do stop behind stopped busses. I do have trouble on the Pirate hill bridge. There are 4 small cross strips at about 10 yards apart and each has a dip that is too deep. It is a little better if I ride it more to the center of the lane instead of the far right but that means going out into traffic more than I am comfortable with if there are buses in the area. But I made it. Was passed here by one lone road bike rider with a very loud juke box blearing. Once I was off the Hotel road and on the last blocks to the Bike Shop, I did see another bike group pull into where they start from. I knew it was in this area but I thought it was on the other side of the road. Hopefully on one of the non-Elite ride days I will keep watching to see if I can start with this group. I am sure they are fast, maybe even faster than Elite but it is worth a try. So this was my 9th ride day, 7th on the Hotel road, 6th from the Cancun sign, 5 of about 20 miles. Maybe I will take a day off from the hotel road tomorrow. The thought that most argues against such a skip is that I have no way of knowing if the weather will turn in the next days and I will have squandered one chance for a real exercise ride.
Friday I did take off and not ride. I will write my trip to Porto Moralos on its own page.
Saturday. Back with the Elite group. If Thursday was the best ride of the trip, hopefully Saturday was the worst and it is over! I of course say hopefully as I am wishing another day does not turn out to be worse!! Group was a little small at the start. I never take an exact count but maybe 15 instead of 20. There seemed to be less talking, less greeting each other at the start. There was at least one other large male rider who I hoped might be slow. No luck, he stayed in the pack. The start was fine, I was back but not too far. The going got tough and I was really all in. Then the van passed me without my normal “I wave you ahead”. That kind of discouraged me and I dropped back into my normal speed. This was well before Pirate. But the ride out was fine. I have confidence in the order of landmarks after Surfin: see Farris wheel, little yellow, another little yellow, pass Farris wheel. Concrete medallion in the median. Right before the medalian, which is probably at the big yellow mall, is a pot hole that sometimes is marked with a cone. Today it not only was not marked but someone in a large vehicle had really hit it and there were 3-4 boulders the size of 6 packs lying in the road. I was of course way slowed down by the sight and was able to go on the curb side even though there is a concrete cylinder in the same area. Also right here there is a slight hill AND one is exposed to the wind. A tough liettle stretch! Here is where the landmarks are not clear in my brain. After purple sign comes grass wall as I have made a note in my mind that the two colors, purple and green, are next to each other. Not really next to each other, just there is no other landmark in between. Two other landmarks, monitor (a hotel which seem to be mainly below grade on the lagoon side and the part sticking out reminds me of the top of the Monitor civil war battleship) and Harry’s restaurant are next to each other but I have low confidence if they are before or after purple! and green. If I had to gurss, I would say before,
After this is pretty much the end. A 7/11. A concrete sign announcing Cancun. Then the combination of pullouts and a hill that announce the actual tourist Cancun sign and I sit down at the bus pull out on my side of the road. Phone says 650. I know the reader has no interest in my sorting out these landmarks but it really is an obsession for me and it keeps me focused on progress as I ride along!
I am writing this a couple of days later and can not remember one ride from another but I am sure this return was not good. My notes say I got out to the sign at 6:43 and then back to my Airbnb at 7:55. One group that passed as I sat was 17 riders and had a red pick up truck with a sign of some kind. The Elite group returning did not catch me until after the Pirate. Clearly I had some other near death experiences with busses.
Sunday. I am back at the airbnb and it is raining the normal Cancun monsoon dump. Over before you know it. I had no rain on the ride though I did notices sitting at Cancun sign that the clouds were rolling in. This was not a shop ride day so I got off about 5:40. Pretty uneventful at first, then a couple scary bus too close to me incidents. I wish I could better understand what causes these. Most bus and other drivers are super considerate of my precarious position as opposed to their massive mechanical conveyance. They pull out into the passing lane and I feel perfectly safe. But other times I feel like I am inches from the large speeding metal bus and that I am about to die. Maybe the primary criterion is traffic density. If the traffic is light, the busses move out to give me lots of space, I am sure there are bus drivers who do not do so but the vast majority do.
I have a lot of thoughts about this situation and 2024 but I will write about them in a separate 2024 page. Anyway, back to patterns. I think my main danger time is when a bus is “trapped” in the right lane by another vehicle being in the passing lane. So traffic. And traffic on the hotel road at 7am is mostly created by stop lights. A lot of the time, especially us riders and often all the vehicles, just ignore the red lights. Early in the morning they are even turned off and just flashing yellow or such. But when traffic does start stopping for them, it obviously leads to a bunch of vehicles all starting off and a bunch leads to a bus being blocked in.
A couple last observations. When the road gently turns as it does every so often, the drivers does no see me in time to correct. Also, if I am going slow, as up a hill or near a pot hole I am more likely to wobble, need to take up more space.
Anyway, long story short, I had a couple near death experiences with busses riding out to the Cancun sign. I did pretty much confirm that the order is pothole, medalian, monitor, Harry’s, Purple sign etc. This is the on the way out pothole that had six pack size concrete chunks scattered around yesterday. Today it was fixed. Well, not smooth asphalted over, but at least filled in with rough concrete so one could ride over it slowly and not fall into a hole.
I got to the Cancun sign at 635. Very little bike traffic. First a lone rider who yelled Tom. I think he is one of two who I road back with last Saturday. He has a white beard. Then a small group who yelled Bueano and had a black truck chase. I think that was about it, maybe one more small group with no chase, The lone bearded came back and waved as he passed on the other way. I had thought about crossing to be ready to join him on his return but wanted to wait for more light and am not sure if he is really as slow as I would like.
Finally got a picture of a bride! They come out to have their picture taken at the Cancun sign at suns=rise.
I started back at 7:06. Lots of enjoyable stretches. Never was passed by a bike group. But again more than one “death experience” with busses and vans. My notes say I was back at 8:20. I do remember a couple slows. here was a parked bus. I just stopped behind him instead of trying to pass. The driver finally came out and waved me around. There was a lone rider out at the Cancun sign on the brides side of the road. We said hello and I told him I was slow and he took off fast and I never saw him again!
Monday. I have to skip on and then hopefully go back and add/clean up or otherwise I get too far behind and forget everything! I love writing the asides better than the main. When I first wroked for the man who had programmed the first spreadsheet, he gave us word processing terminals before anyone had them. He set up his own version of the word processing software MIT used. <CTRL>T reversed the order of the last two letter before the cursor. Twiddle! I though of that as I am always having to go back and reverse typos.
This was of course not a shop ride and I left late like 8:30? The goal was to reconfirm the best way to get to Av Nuayarcan and ride out it at least as far as I had last time and come back the way the hybred riders showed me. I start out on the bike trail near my Airbnb. As I was negotiating one of the many stops/starts, a lone woman rider dressed in the same kind of road outfit that I ware came by. I tried a little to catch up to her to see where she was going but I am too slow on the cross overs. She was not racing along, but… I did see where she left the bike path in the direction of Av Huayacian, so I took the same turn. I never saw her again but I worked my way over toward the goal, constantly checking the Google map to see which way to go. The route was OK but not a slam dunk. I was finally on Av Huay but when I checked my watch at the GoMart where I rejoined after the Hybred ride, it was 9:30 and I really wanted to be back my 10 in order to be on time for my 11:15 exit to lunch.
So I took the median bike path back to the end of Av Huay and rewalked the work around I had found a week ago to get to other side of Av Tulum. I seem to have taken a different side road back down to Bonepare where the bike path is as there was no traffic light at the intersection where I rejoined the bike path. Easy ride home and here at 10am.
Tuesday. The last Cancun ride of 2023 is in the books. Had another rough start in that a LARGE group left as soon as I arrived and I made the mistake of going with it and then talked to a couple people who said no, it was the medium group and I wanted to wait for the slower group. Back to the shop and right away the next group, smaller was off. I had to scramble but got on. I tried to be more aggressive and pass a couple of people who looked suspect before we got to the Hotel Road. But, once we where there and the whole group sped up, I was dropped before Pirate and the van passed.
Not bad making it to Pirate and Surfin. I think I was passed by a large group before Pirate! Made it by Farris and there is a new one I call construction and then monitor. Right in here I was passed by a fast small group without a car. And an ambulance came screaming by. A few moments later we were at Harrys and traffic was stopped. Riders who came upon the stopped traffic moved onto the sidewalk where I was so I had to move even further in. No reason for me to go ahead and then be passed by all the bunched up traffic. Once traffic was moving I started walking on the sidewalk. Right away I came upon the ambulance parked in the passing lane and clearly they were attending to at least one rider. Bikes were lying in the road, looking like a wreak. Riders gathered around. I walked on until the bunch of the traffic had cleared and then road out to Cancun sign getting there at 6:54. I sat and waited for it to get as light as possible, so I probably left about 7:15 and made it home by 8:30. Head wind made the trip a lot of work! A couple scary buss passings but I am better now at waiting until there is no traffic and then using my left hand to signal getting out into the passing lane. Individual and small groups of riders passed me all the time but none were going slow enough that I was even temped to try to latch on. I made reasonable work of the Pirate bridge bumps. I have to be in a low enough gear to survive the uphill and then tentatively move out further into my lane so that I can not hit the worst of the pot holes that are right along the curb.
Did pretty well at the last sight, a complex that has 3+ vertical stones 20 ft+ high. There is a pullout in front of it with small road furniture marking a 3d pull over lane that I have to remember to stay out of. And there are dimples that bounce me around in the rest of the normal road. This complex is only 1K from the end. I race it. Hopefully hear an opening in the traffic so I can signal a left turn and move over 2 lanes so that I am in the left hand turn lane to go around the circle and down Bonepart Av to Plaza de Touro and the Elite Bike shop.
I just returned the bike now at 10am to the Elite shop. They had not heard of the bike accident. I love to be the town crier.