Little Rain

We've been driving eight and half months now ( approx 17 ooo kms since Jasper Alberta) and some miraculous way we've been able to avoid the rain. In all that time we have faced five days of forgiving rain. Today was different. We left Panajachel at our usual crack of noon start after a bowl of chicken soup and rode our bikes south towards Antigua. The first hour were beautiful with lush green mountains overlooking a big blue/greenish lake with waterfalls running along the side of the road. That ended when we got on the main highway that leads you towards Guatemala city. We wanted to take a back road because those are always shorter and better scenery anyways but locals warned us of the few gangs and Bandidos in the area and taking that road might be risky.

Wanting to be safe we opted for the longer, less scenic, more busy highway than the dangerous but beautiful dirt road. Well after riding about an hour of roads under construction and millions of buses and trucks trying to drive as fast as they can, (not to miss I came inches of running over a lady and her baby when she decided to run across the street at the wrong time! Then my chain popped off my bike. I pulled over and tried to fix it. Alain was ahead of me and didn't see that I was pulling over so I figured he'd realize after a few minutes of not seeing me in his rearview mirror. And so they we were on the side of the highway lifting my bike up on one side trying to pope the chain back on and Al looks at the sky and says....You see that big black sky ....It's coming for us......I thought to myself we better get this fix, get back on the road and ride t'ill we see shelter cause it's gonna come down hard. And so it did. Luckily we were able to ride quite a long time before it did but we were shy an hour of Antigua and Alain had a feeling it was about to explode so he pulled over under a bridge and we sat there and experienced a full on tropical rainstorm in monsoon season in guatemala. We saw a mechanic type shop a few feet away so I rolled my bike under the roof and alain left his where it was and we both took cover in the Local mechanic's shop. It lasted about a good hour and a half. Not only rain but hail came down as well. We watched our bikes become part of a river that started to flow faster and faster beneath them. I was getting worried for a bit but then I realized we could be in far worse shape. We weren't the ones getting medical attention from the two ambulance trucks that went by. We're actually styling in the rain. Somehow we always seem to escape the heavy downpoors. Lets see how long it lasts....