life @ 13

(in your best falsetto)
you can try the best you can, if you try the best you can, the best you can is good enough
(or)
"work is for people with jobs"

at this particular moment i find myself tromping around coloniel mexico, which feels much more like eurpoe than mexico, and spends in similar fashion. apparently most of the towns i've been to (queretaro, celaya), the one i'm in now (guanajuato) and the next few (leon, aguascalientes, zacatecas) are wealthy not so much from tourist dollars but from silver mining. which is somewhat plesant, because although there is a fair amount of catering to tourists these towns (big cities, some of them) feel rich but real. guanajuato in particular is very polished.
biking the past few days has been tough. spent much of the past few days going straight at 20mph (30 kph) sustained winds, with distances of 70 and 110k but average speeds barely over 16 kph, which means i've been spending a good time sitting on my little swiss wedge of a bike seat begging the road to bend to the right. i thought about inventing a new ratio -- distance to average speed -- but quickly realized that it was um, concieved, several billion years ago.
the weather here is damn near perfect, with daytime highs in the upper 70s and cooling off to around 50 at night. if i plan it all correctly, i should be able to keep this up as i head north to and above the border, and of course then some.
overall, me and latin america are at a standoff, and one of us is going to have to start heading the other direction. but i think we all knew this because it's happening already. at this point i feel that most everything i'm capable of taking with me is already stuffed somewhere in my head, bag, or intestines. the next few days i'm going to hop from coloniel city to coloniel city (why can't they all be like leon, nicaragua?), which i'm expecting to be pretty uneventful. however there is a 375k stretch from zacatecas to saltillo which seems to be mostly uninhabited and my best chance to experience rural mexico, or at least to finally use my hammock i've been dragging around since san salvador.