San Diego

This is the Hacienda de San Diego. It's about 16 miles south of Casas Grandes. It was constructed in 1902 by Luis Terrazas.

Terrazas owned about half of the state of Chihuahua in those days. He had 30 such haciendas located strategically around the state. It must have been nice. Wherever he went he was always near home.

I'm not sure whether anyone lives here now or not, but clearly, Hacienda de San Diego's better days are over.

Now (right) we have left Hacienda de San Diego and are on our way to Madera. Skip Mascorro, the owner of Pancho Villa Moto-Tours, had advised against taking this route, but Tom and Darrell had come to "ride on dirt," so this is the way we went.

There were some tricky spots along the way. One of our riders didn't have a lot of experience on rough dirt roads. He went down 11 or 12 times, sometimes pretty hard. All told it took us 11 hours to go a little over 100 miles.

Moral: This part of Mexico is not the place to learn how to ride on dirt.