So what’s so bad about being forced to hang out for a few days and read books? The hotel had a covered walkway to the restaurant that had great food and beer so we made the best of it. By Sunday we were a little stir crazy so we braved the elements and rode the collectivo (small city bus) into El Centro for  a day of walking in the rain. Patzcauro is not really a tourist destination and was mostly filled with locals. We did talk briefly to a couple from California.

We came across a market covered in tarps.

Always fun to wander through these places.

Especially looking for “Popular” Art.

Had fun looking in all the nooks.

Stopped in one place and saw this…. They’re everywhere!

Finally settled in for some coffee, cake and people watching on the main square. A little kid about 9? stopped to sell us this pot. 70 pesos, we paid full price…..

View of the square from our table.

Why driving gets a little crazy when you need to follow the signs.

Monday we were determined to go, rain or shine…. It was raining.

If the weather was better we would have rode all the way around Lago Tzintzuntzan to visit the artisans around the lake but we decided to stop only in the city of Tzintzuntzan (try to say that even one time fast…) to view the pottery.

The destination for the day? Back to San Miguel. My fuel filter was supposed to arrive Tuesday at the nearby KTM dealer so we decided to spend another couple of days in San Miguel. We ended up at this rooftop spot for beers above the main square.

Had more time to leisurely explore the city.

Tuesday I got a call that the part was in and I should be there at 4:00. Here are some pictures of the old filter (this IS a motorcycle blog after all).

Fuel pump assembly

You have to disassemble the whole thing to get at the two filters.

Here is the pre-filter that was pretty black.

Anyhow…. after about three hours it was all back together and I was riding back to San Miguel well after dark. I always wondered exactly why motorcycle travelers are always told never ride after dark especially alone. To be honest I was enjoying the ride, it was warm and dry and once I was out of town the traffic was pretty light. My biggest fear was that I would hit one of the huge potholes that would easily swallow up my front tire and probably flip me off the bike onto the side of the road. When oncoming traffic permitted I had the LED aux lights blazing bright to watch the road and made it back with no problems. Deby and I had a relaxing dinner and the next day it was off to Guanajuato, someplace I really wanted to visit.

In the morning we were really glad for these guys with cart for all our baggage, jeesh, do we really need all that stuff? Actually I think we travel relatively light but we have a rule that nothing stays on the bikes at night so we end up lugging all our extra riding gear and now bags of art treasures into our room every night.

Here was our first view of Guanajuato, it’s nestled into sort of a ravine surrounded by higher peaks, almost like the center of a volcano.

One of the things about this city is they have tunnels that were built to protect the city from flooding, as people started using cars instead of tearing up the city to make wide enough streets they widened the tunnels under the city for vehicular traffic. Smart move. Here is a short video I made with my GoPro trying to navigate to our hotel using my GPS. Never mind that GPS’s don’t work under ground…..

Today is Thursday, Deby’s birthday. We started the day on our hotel patio with a great  view of the city.

We visited the Diego Rivera museum, Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Natural History and others including Museo de las Momias. As you might expect we couldn’t take pictures at most of the museums except for the museum of mummies. I only took a few since it was pretty creepy… ok just one here….

This inscription was by one of the other mummies….

On that cheery note, I need to wrap up, birthday dinner tonight and wine on the patio….

Donn and Deby