Days 11, 12, 13

After a celebratory Friday night, Davie left San Diego early Saturday morning for an academic conference (side note: Ashers boyfriend Davie is an accomplished medical doctor and HIV researcher as UCSD with, I believe, funding from 4 R01s at this time... in short, a lot of smart people think you are doing good things if you get this level of funding. It was alot of fun to be able to discuss some of the ins and outs of my PhD research with someone after leaving Seattle).

Much time was spent in San Diego at Asher and Davie´s place resting up for a few days and preparing to get ready to ride into Mexico. This involved approximately a 8 trips to various motorcycle and tool stores looking for bike parts and equipment: we tried to find a spanner wrench to adjust my rear suspension -- we failed in the quest for this tool but purchasing a giant pipe wrench seemed to do trick with this adjustment, a chain tool and new chain, oil filters, oil, and o-rings to change the oil on the bike, knee pads to wear under our motopants, and lightweight gloves to wear in warm weather. Cameron and I worked on the bikes changing the oil and adjusting the suspension on the rear spring of the bike so it is "harder" and better accounts for the heavy load of gear and equipment on the bike.

We visited a Washington Mutual bank to convert some dollars to pesos but it seems that banks do not commonly do this sort of thing anymore, leaving it to travelers to convert their money from ATMs once they enter a foreign country.

We also visited a travel agency, Discover Baja, with extensive experience organizing trips to Mexico and talked to them about what kind of vehicle and health insurance we would need on the trip, what visas we would need to enter the country, and what type of documentation we would need to import the bikes into Mexico. We visited San Diego AAA and a map store. In San Francisco we had discovered that we would need copies of our vehicle titles to complete some of the Mexican vehicle importation paperwork and mom and dad had kindly mailed the letter to San Diego. I picked up this letter at the Hillcrest neighborhood post office. For many of these errands Asher and Aline generously allowed us to borrow their cars. And Cameron and I only got a little lost driving around San Diego.

After fixing the bike we had plenty of time for fun. Asher and I talked about school and old times. Asher cooked amazing dinners both Saturday and Sunday nights. Unice, who speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandrin, treated us to a real Chinese brunch of Dim Sum at a Chinese restruant in San Diego Sunday morning. We watched movies Sunday night and had a going away celebration Monday night. Both Asher and I were feeling a little under the weather Tuesday morning. It seemed just like old times at Seattle University. I was excited to go to Mexico but sad to leave great friends in San Diego.