Santa Rosalia

The start of the days ride out of San Ignacio was a hard one.  The morning showed promise as there was no wind at all but once we got on the road and up out of the valley the wind was a howling. The first large hill was brutal. We were going straight into the wind and it was not forgiving. I was ready to call it a day 4km in. Luckily we rounded a corner and the wind died down a little but on most of the downhills I actually slowed down and had to peddle. A little frustrating.

Most of the day was spent on a very gradual uphill that made you feel like you would never gain any speed. Then we came to the steepest grade on highway 1. Those that got to the top of the hill first waited for the rest to show up in order for Maggie to film us all going down the mountain on her go pro.  Everyone sped ahead so I was basically the star of the show. The road didn't have any guard rails and had many sharp curves so it was quite scary riding down.  

We arrived in Santa Rosalia late afternoon, spent some time looking for a cheap hotel but never found any as they were all full.  Then a lady stopped to talk to us asking about our story and such.  Paul and Alexa are quite fluent in spanish so they did most of the talking.  They asked where a cheap place was to stay in town was, the lady didn't know of a place but instead said she would take us to a beach that her boss owns so we could camp.  We followed her vehicle there with quite the train of cars piling up behind us (because we were going bike speed, not car speed lol). We made our own convoy.

We got to the beach and only stayed there because we were promised a really gorgeous sunrise; the beach was extremely windy otherwise throwing sand everywhere.  Eventually the wind died down a little, and the temperature never dipped much lower than 20C so the evening turned out to not be so bad.

The sunrise we were promised definitely delivered