When I arrived in San Ignacio I arrived to a begining – or a continuance since BdLA – of relief. I had held onto what I can call a scared-pace across the northland of Baja given so much humanity resides there. There was always much to figure out, navigating the towns, and I felt rapid in general. That urgency stayed with me for many hundreds of miles. It was to be quenched in the Bay of LA, as the remote and slow nature of that village brought on relaxation, but my angst would not dissipate to nothing as I was seeking. I was still riding scared, like a ptsd immersion so akin to my racing decades it is uncanny. High alert, as they say in recovery. It was familiar. In that pain is comfort and somewhere in that range I find a happy place and I turn and turn and turn the cranks. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I was going to ride hard and waste myself by the end of the day just the same as all the previous days and it was all in attempt to escape something. That angst further faded when San Ignacio arrived. I attribute this to the oasis like nature of it, and because of the distance I had pedaled to get there. I felt I was finally becoming insitu with my experience – if that makes any sense at all. I would take time in San Ignacio.
The variables that were the most influential to my progress included the weather. In the towns where I would eddie out, I would feel no haste to ride. So I sauntered mostly, and this was correct experience and it typically fell inline with a storm. San Ignacio became a waystation for maybe 5 days as I both slothed, and waited out a very wet cold front that soaked the western length of the peninsula. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I met up with Brian Miracle here one last time. He would head out into the mire of the salt flats with haste, immediately after the storm had passed, and he would pay for it down the road in La Paz. I remained. I ducked out into a back neighborhood inn. The La Posada. I spent the days walking the neighborhood, reading incredible history in an out-of-print book, and simply enjoying the sleepy nature of the town.
I tried twice to leave. I did ride 30-40 miles out of town the day after Brian left, and it still wasn’t any good. At the end of the pavement I stared out at the muddied and soaked road that lead onto the salt-flats and I turned around, hitched a ride back up the road to town, and waited for another day. On that final day, The wind blew southernly and I enjoyed the smoothest day of riding out of the entire tour thus far. This is when I would arrive to El Datîl, another story published earlier.
