Day 137 - 139: Busted rim and bus to Mexico city
I left the hostel this morning, and re-traversed those long dark narrow scary tunnels, though without incident.
I am finding the Dreaming Spanish course to be really good when I actually sit down to do it, but I find it much harder to do while biking than I was expecting. That, paired with the basic topics, since my Spanish is shite, is making it a slog. I am also finding music has become so repetitive that listening to it feels like force feeding myself. So I decided to download an audiobook and give that a try for a change. One “book” that has been on my to-read list for a while is “The Story of Civilization” by Will Durant. This is a book I want to read physically but figured I would try the audio version though fully expect it not to work. I downloaded volume 1 anyway. It is an encyclopedic book. I guess there are maybe two people reading this journal who could guess why this is on my reading list but don’t want to take this entry too far off topic.
I listened to an hour or so of this on the bike but found it hard to absorb anything due to not being able to stop or check maps or losing concentration for a couple of mins and then not following anything. So I spent the day bouncing between music, Spanish and the story of civilization.
The only other memory I have of these 2 days cycling is some clicking in my pedals. Nothing to worry about I am sure…
That night I stopped in Celaya. The following days cycling looked much like yesterday. Ended the day in San Juan del Río.
I had planned to cycle from San Juan del Río the next day but ended up taking an impromptu rest day for many reasons. The United States is particularly interesting at the minute so I wanted to spend some time getting back up to date on current affairs. Also a friend had asked me an innocent question about Bitcoin, which I am quite opinionated about, so I wanted to spend an hour or so composing a proper response. The new DeepSeek AI developments are really interesting for many reasons so I want to get up to date on this.
Finally I had mentioned many months ago that my terminal emulator on my Android phone was broken which I still haven’t fixed. I mostly use this for some helper automation that updates map locations on my website (https://kev.bike/map) with a single button push from a widget on my phone. I had been manually adding these dots for the last couple of months. So I wanted to spend some time fixing this. However, once I fixed my emulator, which involved full uninstall and reinstall, I lost all my bash helper scripts. Yes, yes, I know these should be under source control… So I spend some time rewriting these with the help of ChatGPT. How did we all code before ChatGPT? Here is the simple script for completeness. Of course not shown is install of termux, termux api, termux widget, git, clone of repos, jq, ssh keys etc.
#!/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/bash
cd ~/repos/kev.bike
location=$(termux-location | jq '.')
latitude=$(echo "$location" | jq '.latitude')
longitude=$(echo "$location" | jq '.longitude')
FILE="map/index.html"
sed -i "s/];/ { lat: $latitude, lng: $longitude },\n];/" map/index.html
git add "$FILE"
git commit -m "Added new coordinates to routeCoordinates: lat=$latitude, lng=$longitude"
git push origin main
echo "Coordinates added, changes committed, and pushed successfully."So for all these reasons, I ended up taking a rest day and hanging out in a cafe for most of it.
The next day I was up early and ready to go. Hopped on my bike only to realize my rear tire was flat. No problem… However, while pumping it, I noticed a crack in the rear rim. Shit I think, but not too bad. Can cycle to CDMX and fix it there. But I decided to do a proper inspection and notice 5 more cracks in the rim as well as 3 broken spokes. “Fuck” I think. This seems very unsafe to cycle on. I chatted to a couple of bike friends on Instagram. I decided the wisest thing to do was to get a bus to Mexico City (200km so skipping 2ish days cycling) and go to a bike shop and get it fixed there. I knew this was a bigger problem so figured it would take time to fix. I decided that it is ok to cycle the short distance to the bus stop and from the bus stop to a hostel in CDMX provided I keep in mind the advice of one Instagram bike friend. “Cycle with the following question in mind all the time… If the wheel were to collapse right now, would I be ok?”. Meaning I cycled very slow and took no risks.
Didn’t expect that I would be sitting in a hostel in Mexico City when I woke up this morning but here I am, with a now busted bike. Guess I will be here for at least a week so the next update will be then.
