RTW North to South: Oaxaca O'clocka

KS-Thursday

Ok, so I had to start off with a cheesy title. That's just how things happen some days. Yesterday had us starting out our ride in Puebla, a rather sizeable city about an hour or so from Mexico City, which is huge city. I remember coming over the hill into Mexico City and thinking how it reminded me of Seoul Korea, enormous. And traffic was very similar. We lost a couple hours there in traffic because my GPS dumped us off onto a surface street. Most cities in Mexico do not have highways that run through them like we are used to in the US.
I guess I should explain the navigation setup I'm using on the bike. There are a total of 4 operational navigation units in my possession. It may sound excessive, but there is a reason for the redundancy, besides the fact that my license plate is PERDIO, which means "lost" in Spanish. Just did that one for fun, and it got some laughs at the Mexican border, after the confusion got straightened out. It seems they don't have personalized plates here in Mexico, and they initially thought I had lost the plate off my bike, and was still trying to get into their country without one. My personal cell phone, stays protected in the pocket of my riding jacket.   The other 3, which I shall call "Winkey, Blinkey, and Nod" (Some of us not so young ones may remember the nursery rhyme that comes from). Winkey and Blinkey are an almost identical pair of 12 year old Garmin Nuvi car nav units which snap into a holster mounted behind my fairing. Only using one at a time, the other tucked away in luggage, They get their names due to their extreme sensitivity to input voltage, just the slightest lapse in power sends them into restart mode, taking about 45 seconds to get back into full guidance duty. Which usually happens about 30 seconds before a major intersection on a convoluted foreign highway system. Some days either one will go all day without a single hiccup, other days, the vibrations and jolts from choppy roads will have them in an almost constant state of reload. I am not a fan of USB power connections for anything that moves, its just a poor design for real world use. The maps they are running off of are a free "Garmin open street map" downloaded onto an SD card that fits into the back of the units. I have circled the globe using those maps and GPS units and have had excellent results and accuracy, whenever they were running.
And then there is Nod, a recently discontinued Kyocera DuraForce XD. An oversized, overbuilt, waterproof beast of a smartphone. It lives on another mount behind my fairing next to whichever Garmin I'm using for the day. It handles navigation as well as being connected to my helmet via Bluetooth for music, or downloaded lessons of Coffee Break Spanish. After being almost flawless for 3500 miles, its starting to show its true colors. Its navigation is OsmAnd+ a stand alone system that does not need any cell signal to find where you are, thanks to previously downloaded maps. However, it does not always agree with its neighbor, or anyone else. There are sometimes radio discussions between Chip and I as to what the 4 nav units operating between the two bikes are pointing us towards, usually we go with the best 3 out of 4, or 2, or sometimes we are lucky enough to see a road sign. Back to Nod, it has resorted to powering itself down for no apparent reason lately. On a couple occasions it has taken multiple tries to get the phone to turn back on, and twice it has reloaded and analyzed its entire operating system, taking over 30 minutes to do so.   Hopefully you're not too bored by now, but I felt it was worth explaining some of the systems that we have to deal with on a daily basis. Anyway, back to the ride.
The road from Puebla to Oaxaca was toll road the whole way, pretty good cruising. Its nice sometimes to be able to relax a bit while riding, not that we don't enjoy hours of countless mountain twists and turns, but it does work on your brain a bit to keep your level of concentration and awareness at an acceptably safe level for hours on end. We passed a large volcano, extinct, that had snow on its peak, in southern Mexico. I was not expecting to see snow here, be we later checked the elevation of the volcano and it was over 14,000ft.   We spent most of the day hovering around 7000ft elevation while riding through some beautiful high canyon country, before dropping slightly into Oaxaca. We're staying at one of the nicer hotels of the trip, yet priced way below any of our accommodations in the US.  After checking in, we spent the evening walking around the downtown central district, sampling food and drink from some of the many restaurants in the area. Chip is constantly in search of the famous mole sauce from this region.  I found a barber and got another shave, I had neglected shaving duties enough to where my disposable razor just would not get the job done, and the chinstrap on my helmet was making life a bit uncomfortable.  Chip will update everyone on today's activities, but I do want to mention that we dropped off our laundry to be done, almost 3 weeks on the road, two t-shirts, two pairs of socks, pants, and "others" ,and this is only the second time they have been washed in something other than a sink, or hotel pool. The charge was just over $1, which is usually less than the amount of loose change my wife gleans from my pockets when doing laundry at home.    Time to wrap it up with some pictures.