In the Media

¡El Tour was a small operation that punched above its weight in print. Over the years it advertised in the cycling and travel press on both sides of the border, mailed out postcards, gave slide-show talks in bike shops — and, once, turned up on television.

A roughly four-minute business-television segment featured the tours — studio anchors, an interview with a returning rider, b-roll of loaded cyclists gathering in a Yucatán plaza, and a closing lower-third reading www.bikemexico.com. This is the "on TV" appearance the old site referred to, preserved here from the original tape.

A short clip of a village fiesta at Santa Elena, Yucatán — fireworks spinning off a castillo tower, the kind of evening that found the group after a day's ride.

The company placed ads in Outside magazine, Adventure Cyclist, Canada's Globe and Mail, Pedal and Cycle California, listed in the Specialty Travel Index, and gave slide-show talks at Mountain Equipment Co-op in Ottawa from 2004 to 2006. The tagline stayed constant: "Real Bike Tours. Real Mexico." An early tell of the company's roots: the oldest postcards give an Ottawa phone number, later ones a Toronto one. (These are advertisements the company placed itself; the guidebook mentions — Lonely Planet and others — are on the About page.)