Isla Aguada to Chichen Itza

We woke up to the sound of fisherman at work right outside of our tent. Having arrived past dark the night before, it was a nice surprise waking up to such a beautiful view. The campground was on a lagoon, so the water was nice and still even with the wind the night before.

 

 

We planned to drive to the Cancun area on this 6 day stretch, so we had plenty of time to get there since Isla Aguada is only 6-8 hours away by bike. That being so, we decided to stay in Piste tonight since it would be a good half way marker. We had stayed in Piste 4 years prior on a backpacking trip we did across Central America, but we thought since it happens to be in our path anyway, and we never got to see the big cenotes back then, we would have a look this time. Along the way, we would drive through Campache, a colonial town that was supposed to be worth a stop. The drive was easy, the weather was nice, and the town was just as pretty as we remembered. We didn't stay long aside from eating, we just drove through the walled off town (to protect them from pirates centuries ago) and took some pictures. We wanted to get to Piste by a reasonable hour.

 This is what our bike looks like with all of our camping gear on now.

 These were supposed to be tortas, but they were more like Paninis .

 Great wall of protection..

 

 

Piste is a tourist town with its main attraction being a large, very popular ruin sight nearby. We saw these ruins 4 years ago, but while there stayed at a decent hotel we both remembered well. We looked at hotels.com and other websites before arriving into town, but decided that the Hotel Dolores was the value for the price you pay, which wasn't cheap. We arrived at the Hotel Dolores pre booking in order to try and bargain down the rate. This didn't work, and my phone had no signal, so we took the 5 minute couple mile drive back into town to get some wifi. We parked our bike in an empty parking lot, booked the hotel online saving about 20 dollars, high fived each other on our frugal ways. We also decided since there was an Oxxo station across the way we would get some snacks for our pool side time we would have very shortly. I bought the snacks, loaded our gear, and we headed back to the hotel. Eric went to check in, and realized he didn't have the wallet. Crap, I thought, as I suddenly remembered exactly where I left the wallet while loading up the bike before take off; right on the luggage case which of course is no where to be found now. We once again took the 5 minute journey back into town to realize that the wallet was in fact gone. Not in the parking lot, no where along the road side, gone. So, we went back to the hotel, checked in with another ID and card, and immediately got on the phone to cancel our one credit card that was in our wallet. Fortunately, the wallet we used often was a change purse and only consisted of Eric's expired DL, one credit card, and a bit of cash only meant for that day. When Eric got off the phone though, our bank had confirmed that there were already a total of 3 charges on the card and a total of 45 dollars. The bank covered the cost, and I learned a big lesson. Though, I coudlnt help but feel guilty the rest of the night.

Last time I had our wallet in hand

 

Eric canceling the card

Me still feeling guilty by the pool

 

Eric proves to be happy no matter what happens

 There was a festival going on downtown so we walked around for a bit. It looked like the party was just getting started and it was already almost 9. There were beer and food stands everywhere and a street of food carts just setting up for what would come. We didn't think there were enough people in this town for such an event to start so late and we certainly didn't see many tourists out. We watched a few shows on stage headed back home. While the shows were fun, this, I thought, is real talent: