We made it to Morelia.

We have been taking the tranquilo roads, all the back roads, which has been wonderful because we meet great people in small villages. Matter of fact we were adopted last night and stayed in this small rural home belonging to wonderful strangers.

It was very late in the afternoon, getting toward dark, and we needed water so we asked a family in a tiny village if we could have some water. This was the home of Bardamiano and his wife Conselo. Well, they not only gave us water but they gave us their world. We had dinner of carnitas and tortillas, slept in their compound, and Conselo cooked a wonderful breakfast of eggs and chili. They had cows, pigs, chickens, and five dogs. It was a wonderful experience. They were very poor but they had electricity, hot water for a shower which they turned on for us and hearts full of gold. Just incredible. This was the kind of experience I had hoped would happen we we planned this trip and it became a reality.

Tomorrow we have to go back onto a real highway, and the name of the area we'll go through has us scared: Mil Cumbres, which means the Thousand Peaks. We'll be climbing. Hope we're up to the climbing and the traffic on a real highway after all the easy country roads we've been on. We can't find another route to Ciudad Hidalgo...

We made it to the beautiful town of Pátzcuaro. This town is reknowned for its artisans. Every third block seems to have a church and a plaza, and vendors selling their handmade wares and home cooked dishes.

The draw to this town is the Pátzcuaro Lake and its many islands. We took a boat to the Island of Janitzio. The boat ride transported both the locals with their goods and a few tourists. From afar we saw a statue on the very top of the island rising 500 meters above the docks. It looked like the statue of liberty from a long distance, one arm pointing toward the sky, but it was the famous general Morelos. We climbed to the top of the island where the inside of the statue had murals depicting the Mexican War against the Spaniards. (1810 - 1814) The fight for independence is a very big event for the Mexican culture especially around this area.

The children of the island kept begging for one peso (about 10 cents US). It is common and a way of life for these people. I have a hard time understanding the need to send the children out to beg for their next meal.

Americans have a wonderful life.

Saturday, February 20, 2003 marked the 60th anniversary of the explosion of the volcano Paricutín. It seemed every town within 30 miles was celebrating the day with either outdoor fairs or weddings. We actually saw 3 weddings in three different towns.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon we where riding a very isolated road from Paricutín to Paracho, where the traffic was mostly cowboys, cows, pigs, roosters and dogs. We climbed into the town of San Felipe, a very poor looking town. Most of the house had walls made out of rough milled trees. The fences to keep in the livestock was falling down. Not a single structure had paint.

As we rode past a fence we heard the most wonderful music and thought it might be from a CD. We stopped to listen. It was live. We followed our ears to the origin and found ourselves in the mist of the most festive wedding. Everywhere we saw colored crepe papered bouquets of flowers. All the women had silk ribbons in their hair. Food flowed in abundance, and beer was everywhere. White balloons adorned the blue tarped canopy and the 15-piece Mexican brass band played the most wonderful music.

It was a joy to stop in and have a beer, experience this event and ride on. It left both of us in awe that such a seemingly poor village created one of the most spectacular celebrations of love and community.

We saw to more weddings that day before the sun set and we setup our tent behind a barn. What a great day!

A prime objective now is finding roads with modest traffic. Since most of the major roads have no shoulder, it can be pretty unnerving to ride along with big traffic. So we´ve been seeking out the smallest of the backcountry roads, which is good, but it means that we´re not tracking with our plans at all. Today we´re in Pátzcuaro (halfway between Uruapan and Morelia) and it´s one of the few times we´ve been on our planned route, and we won´t be on the planned route again for awhile. We´re going to go way north of the Pátcuaro lake and avoid Morelia, then come down to Ciudad Hidalgo and go to the Monarch Butterfly reserve.

We´re clearly not going to make it to Oaxaca! We´ll probably go over to the butterfly reserve, then go south to Taxco, then find our way to Acapulco.

In village after village we´ve talked with young men who are home just for a month (for the holidays) from their work in the US. It seems everyone is working "on the other side," as they refer to it.

In Angahuan, the village of only 2000 people by the volcano Paricutín, 61-year-old Marcos told us about his 8-month work stint in Virginia, at a factory with 300 other folks from the same town. To enter the US he had to travel to Tijuana, walk a day and a night to cross over, then made his way to Madera, Californa, and got a cross-country ride to his minimum-wage job in Virginia. Of course he sent most of his $6.75/hour home to his wife and family. How´d he do that?

In small town Lázaro Cárdenas, Jalisco, 20-something Luis explained to us (in English) why the village was deserted and the roads were so pleasantly calm. Almost everyone had already left to go back to work after their holidays. A week earlier, he explained, the plaza, now empty, was filled with cars - there was no place to park.

In Cotija, a surprisingly upscale town in a very backcountry part of Michoacan, we were surprised to see lots and lots of nice, fancy newish cars cruising the plaza, many with those incredibly loud sound systems and hard rap music. We asked our host at the hotel: All the young men are home from working in the US. Then we started noticing the license plates: Georgia, NY, Florida, New Jersey.

We only have to ask the effects on both our culture and theirs of such wholesale transplantation of a generation to "the other side."

On Friday we arrived at the "youngest volcano in the world", the Paricutín volcano near the village of Angahuán (Just northwest of Uruapan). Here´s what I read about Paricutín in my 4th grade Junior Scholastic magazine - maybe you remember the article too: "In 1943 Juan _____ was working in his cornfield when he saw a crack open in the earth. Lava eventually buried his field and grew into the word´s youngest volcano, Paricutín."

We took a horseback ride to the ruins of the nearby village and its 16th century church, which wrere completely buried. Just the church towers emerge from the lava flow. It makes you wonder what it was like to find the village buried in lava.

The village of Angahuán was possibly even more interesting than the ruins. It was by far the most indigenous place we´ve been -- most of the people are Purépecha and many speak exclusively Purépecha, no Spanish. It looked like a village in rural Guatemala or Peru, with women carrying their babies in their shawls and hauling firewood on their heads.

We continue to ride a modest amount of miles each day. (average 30) We have decided to take the backroads and stay off the primary and most secondary roads. The wonderful outcome of this is we are really being able to see wonderful country, small villages and culture we would not have dreamed of.

What we thought were roads with little traffic was not what I had anticipated. The first part of our trip has brought us through heavy argicultural area. We passed miles and miles of avocado orchards.

We actual camped in an avocado grove. It was so beautiful. The bottom part of the trees are painted with white paint as an insect control. The trees are have rich green waxy leaves and are about 30 feet tall and spaced about 50 apart. We found a grove where some women were working at the harvest and got permission. I was a wonderful peaceful evening. And in the morning we had all the avacados we could eat.

Big trucks go with heavy agricultural areas. In one part of our journey we biked along miles of sugar cane fields which are being harvested. Huge trucks overflowed with the stalks which reminded me of bamboo stalks. The roads and the shoulders and the side slopes where covered with the stalks that fell of the the trucks. Luckly we just rode over them with our tires and continued our journey. All morning the trucks passed us on the narrow country roads.  read more here... lee mas aquí... »

FLASH! We got a couple of pictures uploaded - take a look

Today's ride was so peaceful, especially compared to the past two days. We took country roads where there is no paint delineating lanes or even shoulders. The few drivers and the farmers drove slowly and gave us lots of room. As we continue our travels, we will try to find back roads like what we had today
at every opportunity. I really enjoyed today's ride through simple villages where life is slow and easy. The food is fresh and the people are friendly and the towns are quiet, especially during siesta time (1:00 to 4:00) One town we went through was especially quiet. We found out why. All the men work in the USA. That would make for a peaceful place - nobody is home!