Today we were four

Today we were four

Joining forces with Lady Elise and her Spanish Amante, we became a bike gang heading to Tulum, after sharing an Airbnb for two nights. It felt glorious and unaccustomed (for independent little old me) to be in community. Sharing everything. A big pineapple that I bought, which Jen cut up, which Elise made a smoothie of, and then the chopped remains toted along in a Ziploc and produced later at our beach rest stop, passed around amongst us like kids passing a joint.

Likewise, everyone had a Need at some point, and everyone waited for everyone. Made for slow going, but such an interwoven sense of common cause.

What do you call a grouping of bicycles? A clan? A flock? Awesomeness?

Nachos are better shared four ways. Especially when in Mexico. Especially when heavy with that specific kind of hungry that comes from powering your own way around in full sun.

All of the green visibility! Our homemade pineapple cilantro smoothie is contained therein.

One of the "mini super" shops in a tiny town, i call them Everything Stores.

"Once on this Island"

When I was ten, my grandparents took my cousin and me, wide-eyed and enchanted as we were, on a cruise. Our ship stopped on Isle Cozumel (this photo). And so it felt appropriate to go back, 20 years later.

Jen and I pushed our way through the glimmering churning touristy mess of the docks and bought tickets to travel on one of the three ferries that travels the 45 minutes from mainland to Cozumel. The water was like a mood ring, blues and teals in shades previously unimaginable. Our ferry wallowed and plunged and dipped its way across.

We rode thirty-some miles around part of the edge of the island (it's a big island!), on this glorious bike road, which had been the car road, until a new car road was built farther inland, because it was being consumed by ocean.

The main town on the island was bright and loud and all tourist t-shirts and key chains and expensive gellato. But once we bicycled a few kilometers out of town, the craggy-beach wind-beaten landscape incited long appreciative sighs and imaginations of pirates, explorers. The crash of surf. How it all smells. These two lone trees like lovers, together weathering the battering.

Sometimes when you have to make a sentence about all of it, you just gotta make a sentence.

The ferry ride back was a bit long-suffering because it was so choppy: we could sit inside within tinted windows, like being pummeled around in a window-less box. Or we could sit outside, and grasp the horizon for stability, and get sprayed with shlooshes of cold ocean. We chose the latter. Our faces say it all. And the beautiful moon shown above us. Suffering and bliss come mixed together.

I decided to become a speedboat

I could just rave and say how nice, how generous, how engaging our warmshowers host was in Cancun. But it sounds so hyperbolic and lacking in detail. And it is true. I would need such a long essay to encapsulate how magical this visit has been; we've been treated like queens. And only because we are two women on a bicycle trip. We were treated to a seafood dinner and then breakfast in a precious french restaurant, and weren't allowed to pay for anything ourselves. 

Except there was a hold-up anytime we all had to pass thru a doorway; I was unthinkingly hoping to follow Snr. Host to whichever room was next, but it was supposed to be Ladies First. So there was a lot of waving of hands and patiently waiting aside as I bumbled about not actually passing thru the doorway.

We rode from Cancun to Play del Carmen today, which was totally unremarkable and not worth writing about.

Until the skies hardened and the grey rain began. A benign drizzle, at first, then increasing imperceptibly until we were encased in a world of wet. The only way out was through, unless we wanted to sulk pitifully under an overhang somewhere and "wait it out". Highway 307 had wide shoulders, thankfully, so we were out of the traffic, and it was raining so hard that they became rivers. Apparently this Mexican highway wasn't engineered with the goal of water management during downpours.

Each pedal stroke was a splashy swoosh as my foot dipped into the stretch of water. Swoosh swoosh swoosh. I admired the wide rippled wake that Jen was creating ahead of me ("do you mind if I ride in front?", she had asked at the beginning, eyeing the fountain of spray reaching from my rear wheel). 

What is challenging about being in the rain is not wanting to be in the rain, and feeling offended by it. As soon as I embraced the wet gritty feet, the wet back, and cars schlarssing past, it got much better. I gave up being a cyclist and decided to be a speedboat. Then I kept grinning like a lunatic into the deluge and enjoying the bizarre sensation of the pull of water around my tires. I have never bicycled like this before.

The tractor trailer passed us in a particularly deep area of our shared river road. It scooped up a wave of water up and over and around us; I felt not so much like a speedboat in that moment, but like a water-skiier wiping out. I wiped the wave out of my face and felt all last dry spots of my shirt shudder and cling to me then. And laughed with the absurdity of all of this. Ahead of me, Jen made a hilarious show of wringing out the back of her shirt, as if that could accomplish anything.

A small red scooter carrying two be-plasticed people approached us. "Donde va?" they asked us, "Playa Carmen!" we shouted over the spray. And with that, they slowed down and fell back behind us. Some time later I looked into my mirror through the wet wall, and saw that they were still there. Chugging along, about 20 meters behind us, on the edge of the shoulder. Their four-ways were flashing.

After they'd been with us for at least 15 minutes, I realized we were being escorted. They had asked these two soaked bicycletta girls where they were going, and then followed us, placed in this protective position, their lights going, increasing our visibility and diverting traffic from coming too close.

Oh my wow. The goodness of people here. I could have cried from gratitude and humanity in the rain, and no one would have known. 

As if this day needed more magnificence in it, I write with awe that tonight we are staying with my famous old Lady Elise, my bike partner of trips past. She just so happens to be at an Airbnb here with her Spanish amante, and Partner Jen and I are joining them. We three make a flurry of female traveler energy and it is phenomenal to be reunited for a little while.

"Let's run to the beach!" Elise declared, with zero warning, after we had picnicked on chicken, green salad, and wine on the floor. And thus we did, slapping down the empty night streets of this city, full of glee and joy, and arrived on the sand, with the lights of Isle Cozumel on the watery horizon, the Gulf of Mexico lapping gently. We pulled off our clothes and clambered into the velvet water. More water. How is this, we've been splattered unwelcomedly all afternoon with rain but whole bodies surrounded by ocean feels so soft and delicious.

An attempt at a New Yorker style 'Restaurant Review' photograph, going for unscripted, amateur-ish, over produced. Our delicious Airbnb floor picnic.

Before the rain hit, before we got on the highway, this delightful bicycle path between a multi-lane road guided us out of Cancun.

The requisite beach photo. Lunch stop at Puerto Morelos.

Precious and fancy French Cafe for breakfast in Cancun (forget not we are in Mexico), where our immensly generous host bought us breakfast.

"The doors of the houses"

This is my bike box, because I am flying into Cancun and out of Merida (so I'm not using my plastic case), and it is beyond capacious. We didnt even need to coax the rear wheel off to get it to fit. At the baggage check-in counter at the Rochester airport, Attendant 1: "Do you have the number for the oversize bag room?" Attendant 2, looking then at my box on the scale: "Good lord. Here."

Getting groggily off the plane, passing thru customs (which always makes me feel delinquent even though I'm not), and then finding myself at the curving baggage belt. "I am looking for a very very big box", i found myself saying in Spanish, effortlessly, to Snr Baggage. I've definitely had to say that before! And it came enormously round the bend--reunion joy!!--and i loaded it onto this cart and I rolled us forth and could have easily wiped out a family of four.

I set up a staging area under the covered Departures section of the Cancun airport, and proceeded to take bike out of box and assemble. Families and taxi drivers and police swarmed past, but i payed them no heed: i was busy getting greasy and i most definitely did not need a taxi. This face shows my glee upon finally pedaling away from the airport under my own power, my huge battered box left looming over an airport trash can.

Reunited with Bicycle Buddy Jen! The last we biked together was in 2010, around rural SE PA during our Rodale days. And here we are. How magnificent.

The bicycling away from the airport was the feeling of movement after so much cramped sitting, the satisfaction at having just put together my machine, and the squinting and swearing into a rain storm. And I had left my fenders at home, so a splatty spray cloud existed around my feet and grit flew up enthusiastically to coat my paniers. To make matters more long-suffering, I was bicycling along a highway, on the variably expansive shoulder, and the spray-roar from the cars was deafening. Who knew water could be so loud?

I am CRAZY, I thought to myself, in a mix of glory and misery, powering along towards Centro Cancun under my own legs in the grey wet. And also, "I don't travel to stay clean" was my mantra. My shirt was heavy and studded with grit, my pants needed to be rolled up because they grabbed my quads needlessly in their sticky wetness.

At one point I looked behind me to check the traffic and found I was being followed by a flock of birds. Small brown birds. Gah! But a second check revealed this was actually grit flying up behind me.

I believe that pleasures are made to be even more delicious after a contrasting experience, and I even prefer them this way. Thus, finding the abode of our warmshowers host (like couch surfing, but for bicycle tourists: the most generous and welcoming man and his girlfriend), and reuniting with Jen, and having a warm (hot) shower, and eating the shrimp pasta ordered for you, and receiving a guided mescal drinking....all this glowed with a warmer light than ever.

So much gratitude. How are these warmshowers people so GOOD?

Snr Host had this to say, "The bicycle is the only machine in the world that opens the doors of the houses and the hearts of the person's." 

Mescal is distilled from the succulent agave plant and is traditionally drunk, with enormous reverence and pleasure, with lime, salt with chili and crushed worms, and then followed by a whole worm itself. I actually burped worm while writing this post tonight.

One final note about my fun in the security line at 5am today. Thanks to my totally eccentric rule not to purchase food in airports. I was pulled over for Special Attention after my little bike bags passed thru the scanner. Mr. Gloves opened my bag and removed one by one my odd self-reliant little containers of food. I had packed myself what had been 2 cheese curds in a Ziploc (I know, I know) but what were now a single flattened hunk of white plastic explosive. "We don't have to check that, do we" asked Mr Swab to Mr Gloves, hoping to avoid such a pitiful task. "That's breakfast!" I said, with as much benign positivity as I could muster, of the cheese curd and the parmesan container with the flaking label containing a crumbling banana bread marmalade sandwich pressed atop a splat of blueberry crisp.

Thankfully, we all cleared and I got to keep and enjoy that strange picnic.