The trip back North!

So I know that a post is a little overdue..it was a whirlwind week of traveling for both Jeff and I at the end of our Mexico cycling adventure!!

Here is a quick rundown of our nomadic movement over the past week:
We spent a couple more days in Cabo.
Jeff flew from La Paz to Tijuana, avoiding a 25 hour bus ride on the same road that we rode south on.
I took the 25 hour bus ride, taking care of our bikes and most of our stuff. It was quite an adventure!
We met up in San Diego, stayed at a hotel/hostel for a couple of days.
We took Amtrak to Los Angeles to pick up our car in Santa Monica, stayed in Hollywood and Orange County one night each.
I flew to San Francisco, staying two nights there.
Jeff drove the Volvo wagon to Breckenridge to meet friends skiing, arriving safely, and sleeping in my car for a night.
I flew to and arrived in Auckland, New Zealand!

Our last few days in Cabo were pretty fun and chill. We spent the better part of one morning packing up all of our stuff and getting ready for travel without being on bike. Jeff and I had shared a lot of stuff over the trip, so we figured out what was whose and repacked our bags for the trip home. The real project was packing up our bicycles. One morning while Jeff was doing laundry, I roamed around back alleyways of Cabo and asked stores if they had cardboard boxes sitting around...it was an interesting quest. I found a sufficient amount and swung by a hardware store to pick up a roll of duct tape. Then we basically wrapped our bikes in cardboard and duct tape. It ended up looking like a first grader had wrapped a present, but it worked!

We spent our last afternoon, evening, and night visiting some friends we met on our trip, Tony and Kristie. We met them as we were setting up camp on our awesome campsite on the Bahia Concepcion beach. They came up and chatted us up and later Tony told us that he had done the trip about two years earlier. When we mentioned that we were ending our trip in Cabo, he immediately offered his apartment up to us to host us and show us around! It was a beautiful evening in the smaller and less touristy cabo city that they live in for part of the year. We did an art walk, had some drinks, and some wine out on the balcony. Jeff and I proceeded to go out after, following some hot beats we could hear from their apartment. It was a great last night in Cabo.

The next morning, Tony and Kristie gave us a ride to the bus station. There started my epic bus journey. Jeff really should be sad that he missed out...(he isn't). He admitted that long bus rides grind on his nerves pretty bad, so he found a cheap flight to shorten up his trip a little. All in all, the bus ride really wasn't that bad at all. It was interesting to see all of the countryside that we rode past for the previous month just flash by. All the hills were there, where I had my flats, the flooding, everything. It was like a really really fast rewind. I had some time to reflect on the trip and finish up Lord of the Rings. The only real negative part of the bus ride was the military checks. I don't think I talked about these on the way down, but about every 200 miles or so, there are these military checkpoints where they stop every vehicle and ask questions and they have the right to go through your bags and deny you passage or arrest you or whatever. At first, its a little scary, but we got used to it after a while. Well, on the bus, about every 4 hours or so, we would come to one of these checkpoints, even if they were in the middle of the night. I was the most suspicious and interesting passenger by far, and I had to explain my trip every time (in spanish) and explain what was in my bags as they looked through them. It was hard to be nice about it when its 3am. But, I arrived and crossed the border eventually to San Diego without too much of an issue.

San Diego treated us very well! The first night, we went out in the old downtown area, called the Gaslamp Quarter. We wandered into this bar where there was this pretty cool guy playing guitar and taking requests and just general having a good time, but a pretty sparse crowd. Long story short, a few drinks into it, Jeff is up on stage playing backup guitar and was invited up to do a short set of his own while the guy went to the bathroom and have a drink. I did the Dance Marathon morale dance tidbit for "Sweet Caroline" up on stage and danced with just about every female in the sparse crowd. It was a blast! And the night ended with Thai food (that Jeff and I had been craving for weeks) at approximately 3 am. The next day we kind of bummed around walking the town and did a little shopping (I bought a pair of jeans as I had a crotch rip hole in my only pair of jeans for the trip that started in Cabo and was growing larger and more revealing with each step). The second night we met up with a really good friend of mine from high school, Jo Rausch and her Camp Adventure friend Corey. Jo lives in NYC and was randomly just in San Diego visiting Corey to get out of New York, so it was a really fantastic coincidence that we were both in SD at the same time. We hung out at the hostel for a little while and went out for a few drinks and some late night food. It was a much chiller night than the night but before, but in the best way possible. The next day, we put our bikes together and headed to the world famous San Diego Zoo! It is an awesome place and we both decided that we have a new favorite animal, the Klipspringer. We don't really know why, but we couldn't stop laughing looking at them. Very cool animals.

Wow this is getting long...

That night we took Amtrak to Los Angeles. We sat across from this guy that wanted to tell us every intimate detail of his Mardi Gras escapades from the week before, which was very interesting to listen to. Upon arrival, we made our way to Santa Monica to our car and then to Hollywood to stay with one of Jeff's high school friends. The next night we stayed with some of Jeff's friends in Orange County that are students at Chapman University. They had all studied abroad in Italy this past fall semester, so it was a pretty lively reunion. The next morning I got all of my stuff for New Zealand packed up and Jeff drove me to the airport for my short little flight to San Francisco.

San Francisco was fun too! I love that city. I hung out and stayed with a friend of mine that I met when I visited San Fran while living in California this past fall. I had quite a few last minute errands to run and little things to do that kept me pretty busy. Then on Friday, the 26th....well that is the next chapter and phase of this blog, which deserves an entry of its own.  :)