Fourth Dispatch

2024 Wrapped

Happy new year from Mexico City, where a slight mispronunciation of “feliz año nuevo” as “feliz ano nuevo” would have you wishing the recipient a happy new anus (not that I’m speaking from personal experience).

Increasingly, the year’s end demands a bite-sized digest of the prior 12 months, and I’m not immune to this fixation on quantification. I know how many miles I biked in 2024 (7,525), how many books I read (59), how many minutes of 100 gecs I listened to (357)—knowledge that’s simultaneously hollow and gratifying, which are also maybe the best descriptions of my first month of solo bike touring.

what most of december 2024 felt like

Here’s to wrapping up a complicated year. Thanks for following along <3

Route Report (11/30-12/31): Entering Mexico

My last days in Texas biking from San Antonio to the U.S.-Mexico border were gray and monotonous, spent mostly on frontage roads crawling with border patrol agents. When I crossed into Mexico, two cyclists from a women’s mountain bike team in Nuevo Laredo shepherded me through the congested border roads and sent me safely on my way.

creature features: texas longhorn + mexico roadkill

My first week in Mexico consisted of long days pedaling through sprawling yucca forests set against distant blue mountain ranges. I hiked through a foggy canyon in Potrero Chico, loafed around in Monterrey, and took an unexpected bus trip back to the border to get my passport stamped after I realized I’d accidentally entered the country illegally.

river in sabinas hidalgo + mountains in the sierra gorda

In the stretch between Monterrey and Mexico City, I passed through a miscellany of small towns where I ate lunches in central plazas crowded with Christmas decorations and spent nights in roadside motels. I climbed and descended through semidesert mountains and canyons spotted with cacti and scrub, fought frequent headwinds, and rode on a combination of busy interstates and desolate backroads, receiving many friendly honks and thumbs-ups from passing drivers and motorcyclists.

textures of nuevo león

• Odometer: 1,118 miles (5,181 total)

• Flat tire count: 2 flats, both on the same day (6 total)

• Flavors of the month: Refried beans, homemade tortillas, fresh papaya with lime, topo chico, candied peanuts, Oaxacan cheese

• What I read: “All Fours” – Miranda July; “The Copenhagen Trilogy” – Tove Ditlevsen; “The Potato Eaters” – Farhad Pirbal; “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” – Valeria Luiselli; “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt” – Brontez Purnell; “The Other Significant Others” – Rhaina Cohen; “A Wizard of Earthsea” – Ursula K. Le Guin; “Gathering Blue,” “Messenger,” and “Son” – Lois Lowry; “SCUM Manifesto” – Valerie Solanas

• What I watched: Reservoir Dogs (1992), Videodrome (1983), The Holdovers (2023), The Holiday (2006), Love Actually (2003), Romeo + Juliet (1996)

• Sounds I heard:

hola

The Agonies and Ecstasies of Bike Touring

I’ve never excelled at routine and usually feel suffocated by it, but a long bike tour has a certain regularity to it, at least in theory: wake up, have coffee and breakfast, bike for 6-10 hours, get dinner, find a place to sleep. Just that on repeat.

The day-to-day reality, though, swings between extremes. The weather has a mind of its own, jumping erratically between dry and wet, hot and cold. Obviously the terrain shifts dramatically between regions, and on a given day I might glide 110 miles over flat swampland or slog 50 miles up a mountain pass with 9,000 feet of vertical gain. My food intake remains disconnected from my physical output. Some days I can’t eat enough to make a dent in my hunger and others I go until dinner without remembering to eat anything.

At night I either sleep fitfully and sporadically, interrupted throughout the night by the cacophony of barking dogs, noisy semi-trucks, late-night trumpeters, or my own racing thoughts—or else I’m dead to the world for 9 or 10 or 12 hours straight. This is completely random and untethered to how hard a given day’s route was or how sleep deprived I am. To counteract the intense physical demands of day-after-day cycling, I spend most of my rest days antithetically—barely getting out of bed, writing or reading or watching bad movies.

I’m currently taking a month’s pause in Mexico City to enjoy the decadence of city life (i.e., visits from friends, culture consumption, rambling walks, sleeping in the same place multiple nights in a row, daily cappuccinos from third-wave coffee shops, etc.). So here’s to finding balance, or embracing extremes, or whatever it is I’m doing out here exactly.

scenes from cdmx

Special thanks to the friends who met up with me in Mexico City in December: Anna, Asa, Bri, Cliff, and Ilana.