Our 2016 Tagteam Cycling Adventure

[Les Izmore]

Hi Ben!

So far, everyone that we've met who has been to Mexico claims that the difference between Baja and Mainland Mexico is night and day. And in the past, the State Department website's warnings to travelers (that I have viewed) have only included states on the mainland. But we'll check that as we get closer to entering Mexico. But we are contemplating enter at Mexicali, as in the past when I've been in Tijuana it has creeped me out.

There is a great travel guide by the Churches that provides incredible detail about what to expect and where to stay. It seems a lot of first timers head down there in professionally escorted RV caravans. The book actually points out the most popular camping areas for those caravans, so we suspect we'll be likely to find comfort in numbers at those sites. We would like to find some folks to caravan with, but if we are cycling we travel at a pace that is much slower than most RVers, so that is fairly unlikely. One option might be to drive down toward Cabo San Lucas with some other RVers to get the lay of the land and then bicycle back up to California. But most of the bicycle bloggers we've checked ride north to south, and I suspect that is the fair weather wind pattern. So we'll see. We've got a few months to go before we get there, so there's plenty of time for refining details.

 

[Les Izmore]

Hi All!

We'll be crossing the northern edge of Louisiana next week, and will be riding down the western border of Louisiana the following week. From there we will be heading mostly due west to Austin, which we hope to reach around the 23rd of September. We'll likely be spending time in the area visiting family, but thought we'd invite anyone who is interested to join us as we poke along through the area.

We'll be spending the Labor Day weekend at Poverty Point Reservoir near Delhi, LA.
The weekend of the 9th and 10th we plan to be in Oil City, LA.
The weekend of the 16th and 17th will be near Quarry, TX.

We currently have no idea how soon we will leave Austin, but from there we head to Del Rio, TX before heading WNW to El Paso. We are aiming to arrive in El Paso some time around the 2nd or 3rd week of October.

If anyone has any interest in riding along with us or camping with us, we would love to have the company. Our dog is very sociable with people (after she briefly sizes you up), but doesn't interact all that well with other dogs, except when walking on leash.

 

[Les Izmore]

I recently put together a map of our bicycle/teardrop travels from the past 15 months or so, which previously had been in several different Google maps. We plan to update this "master" map as we complete various legs of our journey. So far it is current up to El Paso, TX in mid October. Just click on this link to access the map (I tried imbedding the map in this post, but couldn't get that to work):

Steve and Alea's Tag Team Travels

The map layers describe when we traveled each segment of the trip. It serves as a means of being able to find the corresponding date range in our blog, in case, for example, you are interested in knowing about any of the places where we camped along the way (we generally give a brief overview of basic amenities and cost).

We'll be crossing into Mexico in another week or so. When that happens it will be somewhat up in the air how often we'll be able to update our blog, as our current phones and mi-fi won't work there. It probably won't be cost effective for us to get a Mexico-only mi-fi, so we'll likely be relying a lot upon wi-fi at campgrounds and restaurants.