Ocean Springs to Angangueo

It felt painstakingly early waking up to a 4am alarm to catch a 6:45 flight out of Gulfport back to Queretaro. It didn't help matters that Eric got off of work at 11 the night before and we didn't get to bed until around 1:30am. A helpful motivation was looking forward to a good rest on the airplane and an early arrival back to Mexico to start our 5 day trip. 

Ride to the airport in the dark :/

 

I felt a rush of relief that our bike was parked just where we left it walking out of Queretaro's airport. Eric on the other hand felt no panic for the safety of our bike and knew it would be fine all along. We changed, once again, in the parking lot back into our moto gear and headed off towards Angangueo where we would stay for the night.

The ride to Angangueo would take about 2 hrs and 45 mins, which meant that it would take us 3-4 with stops. And it did. Leaving Queretaro felt long, hot, and dusty. The roads were paved but the surrounding area was nothing but sand and dust storms driving along the freeway. Every once in a while, we would get a foul gust of wind coming off trucks with livestock, which made it impossible to not want to stop and shower in our tracks. 

Truck full of pigs ahead of us= bad bad smell

 

Since Angangueo is in the mountains, we found ourselves stopping a couple of times to layer up underestimating how cold it would actually get. The roads became harder to drive on as we pulled off the highway and up to the mountains. There were far more pot holes and washed out roads than I've seen consecutively on this trip which made it harder for us to drive faster than 30-40 miles per hour, especially on winding, narrow roads uphill. As the sun was setting, we finally made it to Angangueo and started our search for a hotel room. The town was more of a small village upon entering, with tiny houses on hillsides and stair cases made of grass leading from homes to the road and outhouses made out of plywood along each and every house. When entering the town square, the buildings became much more modern, but we quickly realized there would be no tourists in this town aside from us. We found our hotel we had previous decided we would stay at and checked in thankfully before dark. The hotel was nice and clean, had private parking and wifi, but had no heating. In this town, we knew heating was out of the question anyway. After unpacking we headed out for an early dinner so that we could eat something before the town closed. We had learned earlier in our trip to make sure to eat before 7-8 especially in smaller towns. We walked a few blocks up hill heading towards the main square and found each restaurant we saw to already be closed. This was, after all, a very small town with no tourists, and we said to each other we would probably be eating snacks from a convenient store for dinner. Though, many blocks further, we arrived at taco stand and quickly ordered before they, too, closed for the night.

Nice to be able to park the bike right outside of our window