Last Day of Pre-Running
We had one day of pre-running left, and even though Seth was anxious to get on the trail he was gracious enough to allow us a nice, sit down breakfast after an entire day of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We emerged from Suite 101 and found the hotel restaurant to be quite luxurious. The hotel was the Hotel Catalina, and it was an oasis in the bland unlucky dryness of the desert. There was a pool in the courtyard, which I greatly looked forward to swimming in after we dropped Seth off. Even imagining my entire body engulfed in cool water felt like a luxury. The restaurant was refreshingly dim with lots of dark woods. The coffee smelled amazing.
There was coffee.
We had all finally started learning lessons and ordered HUGE breakfasts, just in case they needed to tide us over to tomorrow's breakfast. I demanded that Seth allow me to sit and drink a whole extra cup of coffee. It gave us time to discuss the plan for the day.
We'd continue driving south to the closest place where the course crossed the road. Seth would ride north on the course until he got to yesterday's drop off point. We'd drive back to the hotel (where we could finally swim and eat lunch), and at some point head out to pick him up. Day 4 was definitely the most convenient for the pit-crew!
We headed south on a road that had obviously been very recently paved. So recently that it didn't even have any lines painted yet! It was nice to see results from all of this construction. We found the course crossing easily, and started our side-of-the-road motorcycle maintenance routine. Seth was off! We were off! On the way back to the hotel, we noticed that the lines on the road had been painted, which seemed strange since we hadn't noticed any cars (or semis) passing.
Back at the hotel Jimi and Tommy took a dip in the pool, while I read on the side and resisted the urge to take a nap. We had had a slight snafu with the credit card at breakfast and I used the satellite phone to call home and ask someone to call and double check that it was approved for use in Mexico. I felt like a hot shot in a movie, lounging by a pool in a tropical paradise with my sat phone on the side table waiting for an important call.
After a small while we decided to head to the pick up point and find Seth. We had no idea how long it would take him to get there, and obviously hadn't learned ALL of our lessons yet, because we were optimistic that he'd get through it quickly. We settled into the familiar waiting game. The day grew hotter and dustier, although this checkpoint had a lot more action. Racers were coming through all the time, finishing, starting, or gassing up on the way through. Tommy took Jimi's bike out again and even though I worried about him being out with the race traffic, I was a little jealous that he had the guts to get out there with them. The loss of our two days at Mike's Sky Ranch meant that I wouldn't get to ride a motorcycle at all on this trip.
Eventually Seth arrived, and we headed back to the hotel for a lovely sunset, dinner, beers and billiards. Finally, a good day. At dinner the credit card was brought back to us again with much shaking of heads and waving of hands. I tried a little harder to understand what the problem was, and finally caught on to the difference in the swiping motion of the gestures from what I expected, and noticed that this new fangled credit card with a chip and all sorts of fancy things didn't have raised numbers on it, and therefore couldn't be used by the old fashioned credit card readers that swipe and use carbon paper to catch a copy of your credit card. I found this hilarious, and gave over my normal credit card in a fit of laughter.
The next day, we drove back to Ensenada and found our hotel, the Malena Suites. This hotel had been recommended by Manuel, Car-Part's lone Mexican employee, and he would arrive in a few days to help us with the race.
Ensenada
Ensenada was a relief. Seth and Jimmy took themselves out of town to pre-ride some nearby sections of the race, and Tommy and I were free. Free to sleep, eat, drink, explore, stay in, go out... we relished and savored every moment not spent simply waiting, driving, and getting cokes. We stared at our fully stocked pantry (our suite had a kitchenette!) not believing the amount of food at our disposal. Sometimes we walked into the kitchenette and opened the cabinet doors, just to make sure we hadn't imagined them being stocked with food. I bought a hat at a tourist shop. We declined to buy antibiotics at a farmacia. We put limes in our watery Mexican beers and drank them all afternoon.
We did some laundry, debated restaurants - the novelty of choice! We navigated the maze of pre-race nonsense, registration, tech, qualifying.
Manuel met up with us and we were relieved to finally have an interpreter. By the time race night rolled around Tommy and I had spent enough time by ourselves to be slightly relieved of our desert stresses.
Seth, on the other hand, who had spent all of his time in the desert alone, and who had spent all of his time in Ensenada with Jimi tracking down electrical gremlin's in the race bike, was more than ready to get back to it.
The Plan
Finally race day came, and we all sat down with ice cream and beer for a team meeting. (By which I mean that Tommy and I had ice cream and beer while everyone else had chips and salsa.)
The plan was for Jimi to start the race, and ride through the wash out of town with everyone else, then switch with Seth about 70 miles out. His ankle was still sore and that was their switching point would be the beginning of the section they rode on Day 1 of pre-riding, where "a frickin' tree hung him." He would not be riding over that mountain again. Then, Manuel and Jimi were going to drive to a checkpoint right before the race track started following the road, and switch again. (Incidentally, this would be the same location where Tommy and I sat waiting for hours and hours on Day 1 of pre-riding, where a shiny Californian waved a sandwich in my direction and called "What's a Dazzling Urbanite like you doing in a place like this?" ) Seth and Manuel would literally follow Jimi down the road for a few hours, and hopefully Seth would be sleeping. Before things got rough and sandy they would switch again and Seth would ride the rest of the race, to Coco's Corner then crossing a mountain range to the western side of the peninsula (where Tommy and I would be waiting), and up through the desert back to Ensenada.
The problem was that even though it was a loop race, once you got to where Seth and Jimi would switch for the last time, support cars couldn't follow (race rule of unknown origin). This meant that while Seth, Manuel and Jimi were making their way down the eastern side of the loop, Tommy and I would be driving down the western side of the loop (back into the desert with cactus Christmas trees and giant boulder battle fields). We would meet Seth at the bottom-most point of the race loop at dawn, change his tires and air filter while he ate and relaxed (ha!), and send him on his way. We'd race each other to the next agreed upon pit area (we had mapped pits that were close enough to the road for us to get to in the truck), and wave wildly at all the motorcycles that passed to make sure Seth spotted us.
Fool-proof, I know. This plan had some major flaws, but it was the best we could do with our comparatively meager resources.
The rest of the story unfolds from different perspectives. I'll share them with you in the order I became aware of them.
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