Saturday we drove from Laredo, TX to San Miguel de Allende, MX.
Sunday we stayed in San Miguel for a car show in the central plaza. It was very festive, with a band singing oldies from the US in English and Spanish, the church bells ringing loudly from time to time, and a junior brass and wind ensemble playing in the bandstand. San Miguel is an artsy town on the top of a hill with beautiful views on all sides. They say the weather is good the year round. Many Americans retire or have second homes here.Monday we drove from San Miguel to Oaxaca. It was a long drive made longer by road construction. Parts of the trip were through dramatic mountains. We arrived after dark.
Tuesday was the first day of race registration. We got there early and were on schedule to be finished by noon. As Steve says, by "capitalizing on the chaos of the rookies." However we got snagged on an ambiguity in a recent change to the specification for roll bars--we needed an extra bar in the roof. Steve found a muffler shop to do the necessary work and finally got the registration signed off about 7 PM. We will go back tomorrow to have the official stickers put on the car. Registration continues for two more days, but after we get our stickers we are mostly free until the race starts on Friday. We got the race route book today, which shows every curve and turn in the race.
Here are the sights and sounds of the new bars being hammered and welded into place.
The car and the race computer are both working well in spite of being hammered on rough roads and the topes (speed bumps) that are everywhere here. I'm comparing odometer features with the commercial units used by other teams and ours has useful features for this kind of race that none of the others have. (Our race computer was custom built for this race.)
If this Internet connection keeps working I will post pictures soon.
-Dave
