In San Luis Potosi, a member of a local bike club discovered me on email and decided to schedule me to talk to everyone he knew. I gave 3 presentations in my day there, one at the university (where they even made me a poster!), one to a group of people at the state congress building, and one to a packed library of students at a public middle school.
Agustine, the bike club member, dreams of building a bicycle network in the city (his club was responsible for the few bike lanes we found entering the city), and saw my presentation as a way to promote bicycles. I share this dream, and was happy to proclaim bicycles as part of the solution to climate change. It has been sad to me, biking through many of these Mexican Cities. It is almost always faster to go by bike (traffic), the weather is perfect for bicycles (little rain, warm), yet people seem to think bicycles are only for the poor.
I then biked three days south to Queretaro, stopping at the towns of San Felipe and San Miguel de Allende. San Felipe, where I stayed with a family, was a typical small Mexican town, based on the production of some type of cement. San Miguel de Allende, with beautiful colonial architecture, is overun by tourists and Gringos who live in town. I stayed at the apartment of a quasi-retired American woman, who advised me ‘if you want an easy life, go into real estate.’
In Queretero, I have stayed with Rick and Aaron, two professors that I met while biking Baja California. I talked with a private high school, Imec, and then also, at Rick’s request, gave a group of his engineers at the Tec de Monterrey a more technical talk on global warming. (I also did my laundry at Aaron’s, and the shot on the right is every piece of clothing I am carrying.)
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