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no one said it would be easy

very few independent cafes and restaurants, except for a small number of places for breakfast, which I quickly decided was the best meal of the day. It was almost ritualistic … you met a couple of mates, ordered anything you liked incorporating bacon, eggs, hash-browns etc and chewed the fat, all the while being regularly attended to by a roaming coffee girl who topped you up without cost. Subsequent mid-sized towns all showed the same dull formula of a couple of burger joints, a couple of chicken places, a couple of pizza parlours and maybe a couple of Mexican eateries … all being the big names we now recognise but back in the 1970s had not yet spread their invasive tentacles worldwide.

We only stayed a couple of days as we were eager to get going. We were also eager to get warm as we didn’t really have clothes suitable for the often sub-zero temperatures. Lawrie’s low-key farewell was held in a bar and was a friendly, inclusive evening. It seemed that not many of his acquaintances knew of his plans and the word was being spread with some incredulity. “Hey Mac, Lawrie’s going to Mexico!” It was interesting that none of the group could grasp that we were not going to Mexico … we were going through Mexico to far, far beyond. Even when we would say we were going to ride through Central and South America, it would come back to Mexico. “Woah, you need a lot of spare tyres for Mexico! How many you got?” I remember telling an earnest, seemingly competent, blue-collar worker who appeared to be their resident Mexico expert, that we each had two spare tyres and all the bikes ran the same size front and back, so in effect, we had six spares. “Might be enough, but’ll be touch and go … Mexico is hard on tyres!” With some emotion, one of the guys gave Lawrie a family heirloom, a US Treasury Sherriff’s badge from the days of prohibition. Lawrie promised to look after it and wrapped it in a plastic covering and put it at the bottom of the leather pouch he always wore on his hip. Months later it would cause an interesting interlude.

For reasons lost in the mists of time, we decided that it was too expensive to use the Greyhound service down to New Orleans. It was deemed unlikely that three of us hitch-hiking together would be successful, so a split was proposed. Roly would take the bus and Lawrie and I would hit the road with our thumbs out. On reflection this seems a strange and flawed decision as Roly had no experience of this sort of independent travelling. He was more or less straight out of New Zealand and his natural reticence would make it a big challenge for him. A better mix would have been for me to go ahead by bus and Roly and Lawrie do the hitching thing.