Today, we arrive in Douglas, Arizona to kick off our adventure through Mexico with our friends at MotoDiscovery. We left home four days ago, picked up a few fellow tour members along the way, stashed our trailer in Tucson, and now here we stand at the historic Gadsden Hotel. It wasn’t hard to find: just look for the place with all the adventure bikes parked out front.
The building is unassuming from the outside, but as you enter the lobby, you can see just how grand this hotel was in its heyday. Marble staircases and columns are accented by the original Tiffany stained glass ceilings and windows. This hotel is supposedly haunted, and a thick binder of guests’ accounts of ghost encounters confirm. Supposedly, Pancho Villa rode up the staircase on his horse back in the day while shooting his guns into the ceiling. The seventh step of the main staircase has a chip in it that they say came from Villa’s horse.
We meet the rest of our group for beers and a trip briefing. There are 15 of us in total, with 2 tour guides, Juan and Alfonso. We can tell this is a good group and will be a laidback tour down through the Copper Canyon , out to Sea of Cortez, and back up the Baja Peninsula. We’ll be riding roughly 1,500 miles, about 400 of which will be dirt. We can hardly wait to get started!
-Matt & Brayde
Click HERE to read about the second day of the trip.