A Week in Loreto

We returned to the Rivera Del Mar RV Park a week ago Saturday, and opted to spend a week there, in order to get in some cycling.  Staying a week also got us one night for free.  We enjoyed comfortable high temperatures in the low to upper 70s, though a few days were quite windy.

The road to San Javier, our training route.

Just south of town is the road to San Javier, which for the first ten kilometers is freshly paved.  Beyond that, the road turns to chip seal, but it is also in good shape.  At about 14 kilometers there is a section in a narrow canyon that had recently been washed out, and there were smaller areas of damage farther up the mountain.  We crossed at least a dozen vados (fords), several with water over them, and a couple of them with water that was close to a foot deep.  

We visited the Mission of San Javier, the oldest mission on the Baja Peninsula.  Last weekend was the annual pilgrimage there, so there were plenty of evidence of the big fiesta - lots of beer tents, temporary parking lots, and bags of trash that had since been corralled.

It seems that a leak has developed in our generator.  The result is a strong gasoline odor inside the van.  Of course with the issue that we had last spring with our van's gas tank, we were worried that perhaps somehow that might not have been fixed correctly and had come back to haunt us.  So it was a relief to know it was just the generator.  We ended up having to open up the side of the generator case to let everything air out as well as possible, and we got in there and made an attempt to clean the insides with an alcohol wipe.  After a few days of being aired out, there is still a strong gasoline odor, so we'll need to figure out how to get rid of the the gas in the tank, and then we'll put it away until we get back to Boise.  There is still one full year left on the three year warranty, so we should be able to get it repaired under warranty at a Yamaha dealer in Meridian, ID.

Life on the road is always fun.  This week we got a bill from Idaho Power for our rental property in west Boise.  We called to find out how that happened, and it turns out that during the first winter we were on the road, our property tax bill for that property had gotten rerouted by the post office to my sister-in-law's house.  I guess some automated system at Idaho Power got notice of the expired forwarding notice and took it upon itself to update the current mailing address for the property.  They folks at Idaho Power put the mailing address back to what it had been, so that problem was fixed easily enough.

Our last night at Rivera Del Mar we met Didier, a self supported touring cyclist from San Diego.  He has been traveling for the past two years and has covered about 20,000 miles throughout Europe, Asia and South America.  He was staying at the campground waiting for his father to fly in, so that they could ride the final miles back to San Diego together.

We have been traveling with a bag of pasta in our deep storage for quite a while now, thinking that it would come in handy some day when we happened to meet one or more touring cyclists along our route.  So, it's a somewhat sad comment that it had taken this long before finding someone that we could invite to dinner.  But Didier accepted, so we had spaghetti with chorizo sausage, plus some pineapple cake for desert, while swapping stories of our adventures and misadventures.