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A Little Blue Road

The city of Cancun has been working at a furious pace since Hurricane Wilma to make the city ready for the usual mad crush of tourists who come for the holidays. One of the things they’ve been doing is improving the ciclopista, which is the bike path that runs from downtown out to the Hotel Zone (the H.Z.). The path goes the entire length of the H.Z., which is somewhere around 14 miles, so it’s a big job to fix the whole thing.

I normally run on the ciclopista, starting from downtown, about 2 or 3 times a week. So I’ve been able to see the gradual progress of the new and improved path firsthand.

The city started the week after Wilma by marking off places in the old concrete path where they would put patches. Then the next week they came and cut away the concrete in these spots and put down new patches of concrete.

A few weeks later they came along and put a layer of tar down over the old, newly patched concrete. And early last week, after the tar was down they came along again and neatened up the edge of the tar. I’ve never seen such concern for the edges of a tarred surface, they packed and picked and they raked and they got those edges perfect.

And then, late last week, they put down the final, finishing touch; they painted the whole path with BLUE PAINT! I didn’t see them working on this. Instead I saw it Saturday afternoon as I was driving back to town from an event in the H.Z., a river of blue paint where my new path had been. It seemed to glow and as I drove along it, completely distracted from driving, I imagined that if I came back at night the path would be visible in the dark.

This afternoon I finally got my chance to try out running on the blue path. The first thing I noticed was that the path is only blue in some sections. Some areas are blue but places where the path wiggles or splits around a tree or a flower bed are not (yet) painted. Then I realized that there are lots of places along the path where the grass next to the path is blue from some serious overspray.

What I figured out is that they must have applied the paint with a sprayer attached to a truck. The sprayer must spray an area exactly 9 feet wide because the narrow sections of the path have blue grass adjoining them, and the wide sections of the path aren’t painted fully across.

I was a little embarrassed running on the path, as if my presence there implied some kind of tacit support for its ridiculous blueness. I’m just amazed that after all that hard work, and with all the other things which need to be done here, that the city would waste time, energy and money making the path blue!

Are the tourists going to spend more money in Cancun because the path is blue? Are they going to tell their friends to come to Cancun to see the blue path? Who knows, maybe they will…

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2 Responses to “A Little Blue Road”

  1. JJ
    December 13th, 2005 08:04
    1

    Maybe it’s all in the marketting. I could sell a better Cancun thanks to its new blue path, couldn’t you? “Cancun: So THAT’s what happened to the Smurfs”…. nah, maybe not.

  2. RiverGirl
    December 13th, 2005 09:29
    2

    LOL! Another thing which makes me nuts is that lots of the sewer covers along that path are broken (from the city driving paving trucks over them no doubt). I’m pretty sure the tourists would rather not be looking down into Cancun’s sewers! How about they skip the blue and cover the sewer? Or is that idea so practical as to be too American???

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