Public transportation (Dave and Bob — Mercedes buses!). 

Retail along the way. 

This church was across from the hotel, not much to see on the outside. 

Beautiful on the inside. 

Let’s see…. what was going on in the United States in 1524? 

Destination for Monday was Granada, an easy 109 miles (ha). We took a detour off the Pan American Highway onto CA-3. I would say it’s not as well maintained. 

Plenty of sections where the pavement was non-existent. 

Being off the main highway, traffic was light and didn’t move very fast. 

Keith took a nice picture of me and Deby.

Keith’s bike took a short nap…. no damage to bike or rider. 

Finally, the road reconnected with CA-1 near Managua, we missed the turn south towards Granada and had to turn around. As just after we turned south on the correct road we noticed two additional Adventure bikes falling in behind us. It was our friends, Tad and Gaila! (Their blog is Overland Now)  Wow, good thing we missed the turn or they wouldn’t have caught us. We pulled over for a short reunion meeting, introductions and a few pictures.

Deby and Gaila. 

Donn and Tad. 

They rode with us to Granada where we had a great stay at the Hotel Granada The four of us went in for a horse drawn carriage tour of the city. 

Our guide even let Gaila take the reigns for a while… you think motorcycle riding is dangerous, yikes. The horses took off at a near gallop on a wild ride down a one way street before our guide showed Gaila how to control all that horsepower.

On the way back our guide stopped at a small cigar factory where we had an in person demonstration of cigar rolling. They let Gaila roll one of her own (hmmm, she has all the fun).

The raw tobacco. 

After rolling they go in this thing.

And then into a press.

Then we sampled the product.

We ended the night with a nice dinner with the whole group and a walk about town. 

We took a staged photo for the Issaquah Press. 

Tuesday morning we decided to continue on to Costa Rica and Tad and Gaila decided to hang back and do some more exploring in and around Nicaragua. From Granda, it was a 60 mile ride to the Costa Rica border and another crazy crossing. This time we broke our record, over 4 hours standing around in blazing heat to cross the border.

There were two Costa Rica bike clubs crossing into Nicaragua. 

Most of the bikes were Honda’s decked out to look like Harleys but the club president, who looked every bit as bad-ass as a serious club rider in the US, had a 2006 Street Glide FLHX, almost the same bike as my old Harley. We struck up a conversation about the bike, it was brand new to him and it was clear he had the best bike of the bunch by far and he was extremely proud of it. One, problem, he didn’t know how to work the radio! Ha! I was an expert so I gave him a short tutorial and soon he had the music blasting.

There were two girls with the group, one of them was the president’s girl. They had riding boots with impossibly tall heals. 

Ok,,,, I’m not making this up, and I know it’s true because they had their names on their vests… their names were Ginger and Mary Ann! Oh my, the age old question was on all our minds…

Mike couldn’t resist a photo op and gave me permission to post this even it has the potential of causing relationship stress back home 🙂

Chatting with the other bikers added some entertainment to the wait. I left the president a Harley 105th Anniversary sticker I had in my bag. He was pretty happy about that.

The rest of the border crossing was almost too painful to recount but it involved many trips back and forth to various windows, photocopies, stamps, more stamps and purchasing of insurance. Eventually we got through and blasted to the beach arriving well after dark.

Time to go, the beach is calling and we have a river tour scheduled for this afternoon. Tomorrow we’re riding up into the mountains to check out the local volcano!

Thanks for following.

More Nicaragua pictures HERE. and follow our track HERE.

D&D 🙂 🙂