Here we sit at David and Eva Rodriguez’s place overlooking the ocean in Tijuana. We just had an awesome home cooked meal of Carne Asada, beans, and lots of Tecate beer…Thanks to them and their family for the beds and hospitality.
The ride down was uneventful and very fast. People in CA rip on the freeways. We were doing 75 plus and people were ripping by us. Made me wonder what you have to do to get a ticket….
The border was really no big deal. We cruised right through and got our paperwork. It really is just a sticker for the bike and a slip of paper you hand in when you leave the country. 20 bucks for the tourist visa and 30 bucks for the bike sticker. Not too bad…
On a side note we have been asked a few times for lists of what we’re carrying, Lists of the spare parts, lists of cities were visiting and lists of paperwork needed to visit the countries were going to. We really love the fact that people are checking out our blog and want more info, but I’m sorry we have very few lists. While we are not completely winging it – we took a much different approach on this trip. We prepared and setup the bikes for a long trip – packed the tools and spares we thought we would need – but we didn’t plan a specific route or detailed plans for where we would stop. A great deal of the pleasure of a trip like this is the journey and the discovery that comes along with following the front wheel where it leads.
We’ve done a lot of travel around the world and have found that all the research you do about border crossings is usually wrong. Inevitably there is one more stamp you need, one more person to talk to, or one more long wait to get the bribe amount to go down a little more. So we haven’t done much research on borders and crossings.
The prep work we were talking about in our blog entry from yesterday is mostly things we should have done before leaving but we just flat out ran out of time. We tracked down all the details on notifying our credit cards about being out of the country, details about insurance, purchasing Mexican moto insurance, working through the details of search and rescue insurance – cell phone stuff – on and on and on… and each phone call takes 20 minutes because you have to wade through voice menus and eventually the call is dropped for some reason.
Long story short – our lists and details/notes won’t do you much good – maybe after we get through a particular area we can share details with you!
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