How good is Bill Shaneyfelt at naming desert plants?

December 1, 2018

Rest day in San Ignacio

We said goodbye to all our friends this morning. They were really a little too into their bike tours and were off to continue cycling, while Dea and I were quite sure another rest day was in order. That's not to say we didn't do any cycling today though. Actually we managed to ride the three kilometres from La Casa Del Cyclista into the old town of San Ignacio. This sightseeing excursion took us past the river, wide like a lake and full of water, which made this place such an oasis. It was surreal to see so much water in the desert. This water was the reason for all of the date palms, that we cycled through all of the way into San Ignacio. There we found a peaceful town square and a church from the 1700's.

The church was, you know, a church. But the really exciting thing about it was the garden next to it, because in this garden there were a lot of different desert plants growing. As some of you may have noticed, there has been a regular feature on this blog, the cool desert plant of the day. And what you may not have noticed is that under every single one of these cool desert plant photos that I post arrives a comment by a man named Bill Shaneyfelt naming what the desert plant is. Quite the expert in desert plants is Mr Shaneyfelt. Except - how do we know he's telling the truth? He might just be making it all up, mighten he? He might just be pretending to know, blagging it. (He has been including links to verify his claims, but I haven't really been clicking on them, and maybe he knows that I wouldn't.) And so you can imagine my delight to see that the desert plants in the church garden all had identifying name plates in front of them. Ahah! How the tables have turned! Now I do know what the desert plants are. And so, having blanked out the name plates, I place the photos here, and let us all see if Bill Shaneyfelt is up for the challenge of naming the desert plants now that he knows I know the correct answers. There will be points awarded for the English name, the Latin name, and in many cases, the Spanish name also. Good luck Bill, and anyone else who wants to play, feel free to join in:

Awesome, answers will be revealed tomorrow. Until then here is a little story about how we got back to La Casa Del Cyclista: We started cycling, and immediately I realised that I had a flat tyre. Of course we'd brought nothing to fix it on such a short trip, so I had to walk back. I told Dea to just cycle on back without me, but she insisted on walking with me. Isn't she sweet?

Today's ride: 3 km (2 miles)
Total: 834 km (518 miles)

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