Singing Ants and Barking Spiders

The Days Route: Sayulita to Ixtapa

Heading south from Sayulita we embarked on our first day of riding. We were headed to Mascota to visit my friend Cisco who recently moved down here from boulder. We ate some delicious fish tacos in Sayulita and then headed out onto the road. It was pretty hot and humid but thankfully there was some good cloud cover.

Kodi, Andy and I Heading Out From Sayulita


My Fully Loaded Bike

For me, it was a pretty rude awakening how heavy my bike was fully loaded when riding up the hills we soon encountered. We took frequent breaks for water and stopped in the town of Bucerias (just north from Puerto Vallarta) for lunch. The road from Sayulita was fairly narrow with no shoulder, but most drivers gave us plenty of room and we never felt like people were driving too close to us. Many drivers would honk and wave and Kodi got her fair share of whistles.

Andy Laughing at the no Littering Sign in Front of the Pile of Trash

Lunch in Bucerias

Arriving back in Puerto Vallarta on our bikes we found the main highways actually had a much larger shoulder and the pavement was very nice, so we stayed on these roads through the larger towns. We kept looking for our turn towards the mountains but never saw a sign. On our map it appeared to be close to the airport. We ended up riding past the airport we had landed at the day before and started to wonder why we still hadn't seen any signs for our turn. We stopped to get directions and discovered we had past it by about 5 km. Great. We were getting pretty tired at this point and the sun was getting a little bit lower in the sky. Turning around and riding past the airport AGAIN we continued north. The sign we did end up seeing didn't actually have the town name we had been looking for, but we took the turn anyway because it pointed us towards another small town that we knew was on the same road.

At this point our friend Cisco had planned on meeting us in a town that was another 30 km up the road, but it had already taken us 5 hrs with breaks for food and resting to make the first 50 km. We stopped at a small restaurant and borrowed the owners cell phone to call Cisco hoping that he was on his way because it was starting to get dark.

Waiting for Cisco

He had been driving for a while and was smart enough to continue past our original meeting point looking for us along the road because it was the only route to his house. Turns out he was only a few minutes up the road and arrived shortly. It was a great sight to see him and his truck to take us the rest of the way to Mascota. An added bonus was the ice cold beers he had in the cooler as well. Thank god he picked us up because we were beat, and from the look of the road to his house from the truck, the hills would have been brutal.

Overall our day was great. Here is some data from the ride:
About 5.5 hrs from start to finish, 3:21 of actually riding time, 29.53 miles, Avg Speed - 8.8 mph, Max Speed - 35.5 mph