Tag: Creel

Back to Parral

To ride back to Parral from Creel I chose to do another route. It wasn’t that spectacular. But I still liked it 🙂

Creel

I was up early and anxious to get out of my cramped quarters. As I looked down the main street in Creel is was a ghost town.

creel-street

There just wasn’t any soul to the place. No life. No hustle and bustle that is so prevalent in Mexican towns. I understand it is still the low tourist time. But that is just the point.

Anyways … I rode out and stopped for gas. Beside me was another adventure rider on his BMW. We talked for a bit. He was from Zacatecas Mexico out for a weekend ride through the curves of the Copper Canyon.

Highway 16 and 24 to Parral

Despite thee road being kind of boring and straight. I enjoyed my ride. It was sunny and warm. There were nice rolling hills. And I was taking my breaks.

break-time

break-hill-background

My Route for October 23, 2016

creel-parral-map

Day off in Parral

It was nice to spend a day off in comfortable surroundings. Parral itself was not that nice, at least within walking distance of my hotel.

I looked around for a tire place – nothing. Next on my list was a place to get my haircut. I didn’t see anything. Last was a place to get my measurements taken for a suit for my daughter’s wedding – nothing.

To my amazement though, I saw a Vancouver Donuts shop! Never heard of it before, but I had to go in.

vancouver-donuts-outside

vancouver-donuts-truck

The place was full of pictures of Vancouver – my home big city I guess you could say.

vancover-vancouver-donuts

I wanted to find out how this place got here and if the owners were from Vancouver. Perhaps someone from Vancouver was even there. Unfortunately, the people there did not speak English. And my Spanish is so rudimentary I didn’t know how to ask the questions I had.

vancouver-donuts

Oh well … I enjoyed a coffee and donut amongst the pictures of Vancouver.

Dominos

Another discovery on my walk was a Dominos Pizza.

It was Monday and that meant Monday Night Football. So that evening I ordered a pizza, got some beer, and watched football. A bit of home away from home ahhhhhhhh.

The Very Cool Copper Canyon

I was excited to leave Parral today to reach the Copper Canyon.

Copper Canyon

The Copper Canyon is actually 6 canyons and is larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon! I had read a lot about it and was anxious to see it.

My original plan was to go to Creel for the night and then to Batopilas for another night and then back to Parral. However, I was very concerned about my tire and didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of no where along some dirt road. I aborted the plan and decided to just go to Creel 🙁 But even going to Creel took me through some of the canyon.

motorcycle-break-time-highway

copper-canyon

copper-canyon-2

copper-canyon-3

bike-rock-formation-background

copper-canyon-curves

copper-canyon-curves-2

copper-canyon-river

copper-canyon-rock-mountain

motorcycle-curve

lake-creel

Creel

I was excited to reach Creel. It was a cool town with quite a few indigenous people walking around in their brightly coloured clothes.

I didn’t want to treat them like some sort of spectacle but I did take one picture.

motorcycle-creel-woman

On second thought, perhaps they wanted that since after taking another walk around Creel it seemed to be all about tourism. My initial excitement about Creel wore off quickly. It was set up for Copper Canyon tourism and I felt like it was sort of soulless if that makes sense.

I did tak a walk around off the tourist street but it still felt that way.

Casa Margarita’s

I had booked a hotel called Casa Margarita’s. It was difficult to find. When I did find it, there was no one there. The door was open though. I just sat in the lobby waiting for a long time. Not much security here.

creel-hotel

Finally I was escorted to my room. It turned out to be really small. No air conditioning and no window to the outside. Just one into the lobby below.

room-creel

creel-hotel-foyer

I just didn’t feel comfortable here. Since I wasn’t going to Batopilas, I thought of spending 2 days in Creel. Not any longer. I decided I would go back to Parral the next day.

Batopilas

While in Creel I heard from a fellow adventure rider who I had met in Fairbanks, Alaska. Unfortunaly, he was now hospitalized in Mexico City with heart problems. Anyways, he had heard I was thinking about going to Batopilas. He wanted to warn me that the town was filled with drug gang members.

I had previously read about this in another blog. In that blog he said the gang members left him alone while he was there.

Perhaps another good reason not to go there with my cracked tire.

Boot Problems

The day before the zipper puller thing on my boot broke. Just googled it and it is called a pull tab. I wasn’t too far wrong! I had been using plyers to pull it up and down. When I was taking my boots off at Creel I couldn’t get the zipper to come down even with plyers. Eventually I worked it down.

I asked the hotel Manager if there was a shoe repair place in town. He said no.

I went for a walk to think about how to solve this problem. Zip ties came to mind. When I got back to the hotel I pulled out the smallest zip tie I had. Sure enough, it worked!!!

boot-zip-tie

SOOOO proud of myself ha ha ha.

Well … the place was dead. I just went to bed after a really nice ride to get here.

My Route for October 22, 2016

parral-creel-map

Translate »