Mexico is beginning to seem unobtainable. At the first attempt, my bicycle fork foiled us at the border (US side) and at the second we got 20 metres into Mexico at Antelope Wells before finding out that the nice man in the immigration shack wasn’t there… That was a bit of a shame really, as he was there the 1st time we were there. We’d even heard that he might give us a tourist card for free. Feeling a bit at a loss, the nice customs man on the mexican side suggested we go a couple of hours away to another border crossing… We’re not sure he’d registered the bicycles in front of him.

So, we got our bits of paper back from the nice person in the US side, who didn’t seem perturbed by our re-appearance, and set off back up the road again. We did our first 100km+ day getting back to the campsite we’d used on Saturday (when heading to the border the first time). The border patrol people, who don’t seem to do much apart from drive around all day and occasionally stop and chat with stray cycle tourists, must be wondering about us by now.

End result – we’ve done another 100km day and are in Columbus (a bit further east than Antelope Wells and open 24hrs a day) where we hope they have a nice man who’ll let us into Mexico tomorrow morning! Sarah has quite rightly decided that riding 100km in a day gives her saddle too much of a chance to inflict pain, and that long straight roads are boring. We don’t quite know how the road-only cyclists manage it.

I also have (yet another) new fork. BIKE GEEK ALERT! It’s a Rockshox Tora 302 U-turn (The old one was a 312). This means that his front rack still fits on it and the stiffer spring that he has also goes in it; but that it’s a bit of a step-down in nice-ness from the original. The good news is that it works and didn’t cost us anything – Jay (one of the nice men from the Silver City Gila Hike & Bike shop) got so sick of fixing the old one he gave us a new one. Unfortunately they didn’t sell the same one any more… I and the new fork have agreed to differ and may eventually make friends, but he’s missing the old one. END OF BIKE GEEK BIT.

We are going to have to do another couple of longish road days to get back into the mountains. We’ll head to Nuevas Cases Grandes via Janos, and then up into the Sierra Madera Occidental by dirt roads towards El Largo and Madera. From there we’ll head towards Creel and the Copper Canyon. We think there’s internet in NCG, Madera and Creel, so will update when we can.