Dia Siete: The Dawn Patrol

Joe and Juanita must like to fish.  They wanted to leave Cholula this morning at 6:00.  I negotiated them down to 7:00, which still about kilt me, but it was fun leaving the city as dawn was brightening, seeing people cooking tripas out on the sidewalk, a man on a bicycle with two metal milk cans strapped to it like panniers slowly heading toward the market, Popocateptl coming alive in the rising sunlight. 

We bombed happily along for an hour or so, then stopped at a little roadside cafe which was just opening and had yet another wonderful meal...nothing like enchiladas with fresh cheese for breakfast.  After, we entered a small town with the GPS giving specific instructions on how to proceed through to the other side.  The GPS was mistaken.  We had entered The Labyrinth.  We found dead ends at every turn.  We practiced u-turns many, many times. We stopped at the square and asked a huge swarm of cops who had mustered in the early morning for some kind of in-service, in a slouchy, Sunday-morning sort of way, how the heck we could get to the highway.  Two immediately got into a moderately heated argument pointing, of course in opposite directions with exquisitely complex instructions for turns and landmarks to look for.  Finally one of the two kind of huffed off, and the other turned out to have a little English, and to have lived in Brooklyn at some point.  He proudly named off all the sections of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, etc, for us.  We chose, at random, his directions.  They were wrong,  The Minotaur almost got us, but at the last second I chose a turn and...bingo, we were out of the town, nearing the highway.  Off we went.  Somehow we did NOT get lost in Cuernavaca.  I don't understand it.  We turned off not too far north of the city through a national forest, full of pine trees and pastures, not unlike northern New Mexico, with the Mother of All Squiggle Roads, and springlike temperatures.  Big Fun for the motorcycle part of our brains.  By the end of all the squiggling we were tahrt out and decided to head for the Autopista to get to Guanajuato a little quicker. Only the major highway up to the autopista was even MORE twisty, with giant trucks and buses for additional excitement.  By the time we found the autopista to take us west past Queretaro we were not only tahrt, we were HOT.  Throwing all previous moderation goals to the winds, we ran west at autobahn speeds, finally arriving late afternoon in Guanajuato, only to have the stupid GPS again send us wandering around the city, through tunnels, and eventually up what Joe seems to think was a cobbblestone cliff, to our wonderful bed and breakfast, Casa Zuniga, just below, and I really mean JUST below the giant statue of Pipila overlooking the entire city.  Dinner late, now off to bed, all day tomorrow to wander the city's callejones, etc. 

View from my balcony: