Guadalajara Nov 3- 6 Marion's Version

November 3-6th

Guadalajara

Guadalajara is the second largest city in Mexico with over a million people (is it 1.8 million?) Anyway, it is big and it is cosmopolitan. It was actually surprising to me, after all of the small towns it was much less “Mexican” than I was expecting, although I didn’t really have any preconceived idea of it. I was actually interested to see Guadalajara as my friend Ruthie spent a semester there in college and had good things to say about the whole thing.

Davis and I headed straight for Xavier’s place after hitting town and dropping off our bags at the low priced but somewhat depressing Hotel Estacion (train station hotel- there are no more passenger trains in Mexico and so it is always a good bet that the old train station hotels will be cheap). Xavier was just what we were hoping- a lovely French expat who spoke wonderful English. He immediately started questioning Davis as to why we hadn’t both come on Yamaha 250‘s. Davis said that he had actually had that thought himself but that he had already had the BMW 650 single cylinder and that it was fuel injected so better for altitude and a bit more powerful etc. Xavier was not impressed.

He invited Davis and I to have lunch with him and his son and regaled us with tails of his travels through Africa on a 125 CC motorcycle in the 70’s. His shop was quite impressive with many employees and a motorcycle dealership upstairs. After assurances that they did much more difficult suspension jobs all the time (lowering BMW GSs for shorter Mexicans, for instance) we left with good feelings.

Guadalajara was basically the equivalent to some of our stops on road trips in the US when we indulge in typical generic stuff, like Outback Steakhouse. In this case, we went to an Argentine steakhouse restaurant (to celebrate of course) and a movie, In Time with Justine Timberlake (an interesting concept for a movie, not terribly well done but a good excuse to read Spanish subtitles and perhaps learn a little even while vegging). We did spend an interesting afternoon in the downtown area and have some interesting pictures.

I can tell you that riding in Guadalajara was an interesting experience and not something that I would replicate if I had the option. While we had no problems, there were a few moments of tension... It’s interesting. The driving style of Guadalajara actually changes depending on what day and what time you are out and about. The second day, we stopped by the shop at the end of the day to see how progress on the shock repair was going. It happened to be rush hour on Friday. After that, we decided that taking a taxi was a much more relaxing way to travel.