While on the subject of New Year – we were invited to see the new year in at Rocky Point in Mexico with friends. We happily accepted and vaguely planned to ride the bikes down from San Francisco. Actually I was really looking forward to the opportunity of riding through southern California – what I’d seen of it so far, the coastline down to Big Sur, was stunning. In any case we figured it would take about two days to ride down. It’s a case of heading to the border and turning right. No?
Then we actually got a map out. California is really rather deceptively long as it turns out. Door to door it was looking like approximately 900 miles. We’ve certainly ridden further in two days but on closer examination, the route along the small roads was going to take far too long. So now we were looking at a two day blast down the Interstate. Not fun.
Then we thought about it some more. While the border south of Phoenix isn’t the worst part of Mexico, you still don’t want to be crossing it at night. And you REALLY don’t want to be crossing at night on a bike. So we would have to spend the night on the US side then ride the last 250 miles or so in the morning. So now it would be a 2.5 day trip which would mean we’d have no time to actually BE there before turning round.
Somewhat disappointed we admitted that taking the bikes was not the way to go. We did have a hire car – so we could just drive that down to Mexico, potentially even in one go if we took turns – right? Wrong. Most car hire companies won’t allow you to take your car to Mexico (or take a driving test in it but that’s a different story).
Hmmm. Then we reasoned that a car rental joint nearer the border just HAD to allow you to cross it. We thought maybe we could bike/ drive to San Diego and take a car from there. That was a pretty good plan. The only thing is that rental companies in San Diego that allow you to take their vehicles into Mexico don’t see the need to rent cars. We could have hired a truck or a bus. Why would you not want to transport lots of people and/ or gear in and out of Mexico? Sigh.
This was harder than we thought. We nearly gave up but did eventually make it to Mexico – by flying in and out of Phoenix and renting a car there (mucho extra paperwork required including a promise to bring it back in one piece). Sheesh!
Once we made it to Rocky Point we had a great couple of days. We walked along the beach watching the pelicans fishing, tasted many different establishments’ finest margaritas but my favourite bit of all was visiting the port to watch the fishing boats come in.
