Day 125 - Day 129: Guadalajara rest days
Guadalajara is a great city tho is very spread out. I believe it is 4 towns/cities in one. So it can be awkward to get around. It is the largest metropolitan area in Mexico outside of Mexico city. So deffently a cool place to explore for a couple of days.
I did manage to fix my bike which took me about 6 hours spread over 2 days. The problem was a bent derailleur hanger. I had a spare that I had ordered while in Baja. Taking apart the bike to replace this was a little nerve-wrecking, but turns out simple enough. However, I had to remove the shifter cable from the derailleur during this process and couldn’t tread it back in due to it being badly frayed. Replacing a shifter cable was also a first for me but after much messing with my handle bars and fiddling with the cable, I managed this too. This was about 3 hours of work.
Then spent another 3 hours indexing the gears from scratch. Felt like I was making no progress with this until everything came together really quickly. The indexing process was incredibly satisfying. Gear indexing has always been a big mystery to me so I now feel like I have a much better grasp on how my bike works. Also this YouTube video is incredible and should be taken as a how to on how to do how to videos: https://youtu.be/UkZxPIZ1ngY?si=oYNeFxkNSVcT342M
No more bike updates from my time in Guadalajara. Did meet some cool people. I attended a salsa + bachata social which was very intimidating as my salsa skills are mostly limited to mentally counting to 8 while skipping 4 and 8. The social was in the middle of the street, attended by 100 people at a guess and very lively. I think Latinos are just naturally born with the ability to dance, unlike my awkward two left feet and inability to keep any kind of rhythm, not helped by my inability to hear the clave (or understand Spanish). Tho this is something to work on I guess. Fun nonetheless.
I also attended a Go (board game) club meeting which was cool. Is great to get some games over a real board. Am continuing to dazzle the Mexicans Go players with ridiculous 5-5 pt Jōseki, giving up all the corners, going all in on a huge center and (attempting to) kill whatever dragon my opponent tries to conjure there.
One of the unexpected benefits of falling so far behind the other bike tourers I know is that I don’t need to do any research on where to go next. I can just roughly follow in their footsteps. Less thinking and decisions for me is always great. So the next place to aim for in 2-4 days is a pueblo mágico called Guanajuato.
