As we left “Brown Hotel” to hit the road I realized my front tire was flat. It was really weird because an hour earlier it was fine. When I took out the tube to look at it we could not find a hole. I tried to pump it but somehow my pump was busted… With no gas stations in town with an air pump I was getting discouraged. I was worried we would have to find a hotel and wit for the lone car dealership to open and ask to use a tire pump.
Fortunately Jake had an idea. He put one of his tubes, which are made for a road bike and nt the same as mine, and filled it up. It worked and we were up and running again. We list a lit of day light though and only got a few miles done before we had to stop. There isn’t a lot of cover in anew Mexico but we found a small pathway under so e nearby rail tracks and set up camp on the backside of the tracks. We were out of sight of the highway and figured train operators wouldn’t notice or care about two small tents near a fence 100 ft from the tracks.
The night was not the best for me and had two kind of bizarre moments. First off, I woke up because I heard a loud scraping noise. Even in my barely awake stupor I realized that something was odd because it was only coming from one ear. it hit me that a bug w crawling into my ear canal. I kind of freaked out but pulled the bug out without any harm. The second time I woke up it was because my right eye hurt. I figured my contact was dried out so I took it out of my eye and put into a case. It wasn’t until morning that I investigated and found two contacts in the case. All I can figure is some contact that I lost a while ago was up in my eye this whole time and finally came out.
Well, we got on the road pretty early in hopes of avoiding some of the evening wind. The first 20ish miles went well. The animals seemed to enjoy our presence, a grasshopper jumped on my shoe and hung out for a while, and a hawk flew with us for about half a mile. There were also some horses that came near us, we stopped and tried to get them to come closer but they were lame. We stopped in a “town” called Wagon’s Mount for lunch and rest knowing there wasn’t much between here and Las Vegas.
The ride to Las Vegas was awful but the city is sweet. I feel like I’m really getting close to the west coast and loving it. Our CS host, Paul, is a woodsmith who makes a variety of things but his artistic talent realky shows with his skateboards. He was an amazing host who cooked us dinner and took us up to these amazing hot springs where our legs got much rest for a while. It was an amazing time and I really had a great time. Sleep came easy last night.
Wandering Oak 