No cord, no blog

It was around 3 am. I woke up in our nice cabin aboard the Chihuahua Star ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan. Something seemed wrong. It had been nagging at me that when we grabbed our stuff out of our bikes to come above on the boat, I couldn't find our bag of coffee. I always nestled in the right pannier, between the air compressor and the first aid kit. But I couldn't find it. No big deal. It was just coffee.

[where the girls slept for the night] But what I realized at 3 am is that not only was the bag of coffee missing, the red satchel that contains all of our power cords was also not there. You know that feeling you get when you realized (or just know) that you have done something bad. It is a butterfly like twinge in your stomach. Sort of a cross between guilt and dread. Well let me tell you that that feeling also prevents you from falling back asleep.
I wanted to sleep because we were spending 500 dollars to take this ferry over ($70 of which is for the cabin) and I wanted to be rested for the next day. I thought to myself "I can deal with this. There will be a solution to the cord problem. Just meditate on something to take your mind off of the problem."

So I cleared my head and thought about a red rubber ball- I don't know why a red rubber ball, it just seemed something benign to meditate on. The coolest thing happened. As I lay there forcing myself to think about only a red rubber ball, my mind created a dream in which someone handed me the red satchel with the cords. In my 3 am state, I believed said dream, felt relaxed and fell back asleep. Hooray for the red rubber ball!

We arrived in Mazatlan the next morning, no red satchel in hand. The facts:

• The red satchel contained:

1. charger for my mac computer
2. charger for my ipod touch and ipod shuffle
3. 2 chargers for our headset communication system
4. cell phone charger
5. a bunch of batteries
6. some other random cords and such.
7. --- as an aside, wouldn't it be nice if there was one charger for all of this? ---

• The next ferry arrived in 2 days time.
• I knew exactly where I had left the satchel- in our guest house.
• On the ferry that we took, there were 2 other parties who had also stayed at our guest house
• The ferry dock is about 30 minutes from La Paz
• Mazatlan has a reputation as a crappy place, but in reality the old down town is amazing nice. Plus there is good running in town.

 [our ferry heading back to La Paz to get my cords]

We checked into the Belmar hotel which is the definition of "fading glory." You can tell that back in the rat pack days this is the kind of place Frank Sinatra would have stayed. It just hasn't been kept up at all since then. But the aging staff is ridiculously nice, the rooms are large, it is right on the beach in the old part of town ,and there was safe motorcycle parking in the once lovely courtyard (right next to a BMW moto with Scottish plates- belonging to one Mike Anderson- a retired gentleman who has spent the last 9 years travelling the world full time first on a bicycle and now on a BMW).

[look closely in the center of the photo] We made some phone calls to the Pension California in La Paz and through Ricardo was told that "maybe" this might work out. He had the case and was actively looking for folks to take the precious cargo over to Mazatlan.

[a line in the old town square for free H1N1 shots- ahhhh nationalized health care- so affordable] Old town Mazatlan is a marvelous place. Artists everywhere. Well kept streets and buildings. A very very busy central market with some of the most delicious prawns you can imagine for 3 dollars a pound. It was not difficult to kill two days in this town. One of the added bonuses: I couldn't really use my computer. We checked email on the ipod but eventually this ran out of juice. I wanted to save the laptop battery in case we had to revert to plan B: buy new cords in Guadalajara.

[pardon me, do you happen to have a red satchel?] No plan B was necessary. A brother and sister team from France showed up on Friday morning all smiles with our red satchel in hand. I tucked it into its rightful home between the cook pot and the motorcycle cover and we were off down the pacific coast of the mainland.

[our home made shrimp tacos- made in one stainless steel pot on an optimus stove with lots of butter]