San Salvador to Barra Santiago – April 13

I was back at the shop for 8am to see about getting Petra’s bike reassembled in a timely fashion.  It took some time to fabricate a new return spring for her starter button, but it was finally done and ready to go by 11am.

Unbelievably, as we began to move the bikes outside to reattach the panniers, one of the mechanics noticed that my new rear tire had gone flat in the night.  The tube had been punctured in the tire swap. That’s puncture number seven, but at least I didn’t have to fix it on the side of the road in Guatemala.

The boys quickly removed the wheel and sent it back across town to the tire shop to be repaired. Unfortunately, the repair didn’t get completed until close to 2pm, leaving us very little riding time on a border crossing day.

We rode back to the ocean in La Libertad and then along the coast highway past Acajutla to Barra de Santiago, a beach town on the pacific. The ride was hot again, especially as I stewed over the time lost to unnecessary repairs, and our inability to get any further distance today, so we ran for a swim in the surf straight away before the sun had set.We’re hitting the sack early so that we can get started for the Guatemalan frontera at first light.  The border’s only 30km away, but we want to give ourselves as much riding time in Guatemala as possible and get to Mexico as soon as we can.