Texas Country: Part 1

Day 30, Mile 1400

Wide open Texas road




This is part 1 of Texas Country because it’s a HUGE state.  We’re 500 miles into the state, and have about 700 miles to go.  The expanses have been huge.  Wide open spaces, filled with golden grasses blowing in the wind.  (Those grasses have been prettier when they’re blowing WITH us).  But we’ve also seen mountains.  We climbed to over 6000 feet, up to a space observatory, in the Davis Mountains.  We’ve peddled on interstate highways, and quiet country roads.  And we’ve been talking with the people.  This last week we’ve talked with a long haul truck driver, an astronomer, a couple of people living at a hippy commune (where we stayed),  oil exploration geologists, a few cross country cyclists going west,  border patrol agents, and a woman who immigrated from Mexico.  There’s something about traveling by bicycle that makes us very approachable.  These people, and their different stories, are everywhere, but how often do we talk with them in our regular lives? 



One more closed store... argh.




Getting an education about telescopes



You'd never guess this tiny store has great BBQ!



The other interesting thing we’ve noticed in the last 1400 miles is how closed the border country is.  I mean the towns…they’re closed up.  Whether it’s because the mine has closed down, or they mechanized the fields, or tighter border control, we’ve seen more closed service stations, general stores, and entire towns than we could count.  It’s eerie and interesting at the same time.  We have to plan very carefully to make sure we don’t run out of food/water when traveling in these wide open spaces, where it will literally be 60 miles between buildings of any sort.   But in a matter of days we’ll be into more populated eastern Texas, with more towns and more people.



We love hearing from everyone.  Keep the emails coming and we’ll keep these blog updates coming every 10 days or so.



Oh yea.  The highlight of Texas so far…..the BBQ!





Lots of fenceline in large, expansive Texas















Cold Desert Riding

Day 19, Mile 901

We took almost a whole day riding into Phoenix, and it took nearly that long to leave the city as well.  It's a big place.  But then we headed up into the mountains and through some amazing canyons.   The route from Phoenix to El Paso was totally in the desert, but we watched it slowly change its appearance.  As we gained and lost elevation, and as we moved East, we saw the variety of cacti change, and then the desert began to gain golden grasslands.  The prettiest area we rode through was the saguaro cactus canyon country around Superior, Arizona. We climbed a few thousand feet out of that defunct copper mining town as we headed through the red walled canyons.

 




Some beautiful desert riding.



And gorgeous desert camping.

The desert is stunningly beautiful, in a stark and barren desert way. We were told by the locals we chatted with this week that this is the coldest weather they've seen in 40 years, and many people and stores have had broken pipes. The highs were up to a chilly 40 degrees during the day and down to single digits to teens every night, with frozen water bottles in the morning. (Did we mention that we are camping?  Brrr!) We've actually been surprised during the day when we're riding in shorts and notice that a water fountain is frozen solid.  Then we see a thermometer and notice that it's only 37 degrees.

Great local food.



 We love to stop and get local specialties like huevos rancheros as a rare restaurant treat, but every morning we try to melt the cold out of our bones with coffee in some small cafe or convenience store after our camping breakfast of oatmeal. In Columbus, New Mexico, we stopped in the American Legion hall, which had a banner inviting people in to share coffee.  It was a great way to stop and chat with people living in a tiny town right on the Mexican border.




Rough road!



Wide open, high, grassy desert.

 MOST of our roads were nice and smooth, and almost all of New Mexico was lovely quiet riding right along the Mexico border all the way into El Paso Texas.  However, we decided to take a slightly longer route near the Calvin Coolidge Dam, on the Apache Indian Reservation.  By the time we got 11 miles in, the road (in the above picture) began to deteriorate.  Because of the amazingly bumpy asphalt, it took us nearly all day to travel the next 17 miles, but we only saw one car.  My butt aches just remembering that day.

We are currently staying with a Warm Showers host in El Paso.  If you are not familiar with this, Warm Showers is an informal group of people all over the world who volunteer to host cyclists, and to use the service, you also need to be available to host people traveling by bike.  It's really an amazing thing.  Complete strangers put their name and phone number on the internet and say "If you're coming through El Paso, give me a call.  You can stay in my house, get warm and clean, use the kitchen, clean your clothes, and take a day off."  It's one more connection that we can make with people we otherwise would not.  West, our current host, is an expert in cross border (American/Mexican) issues and runs a non-profit organization to teach mostly college age students about these problems.  We're staying one mile from Juarez, Mexico, one of the most dangerous places in the world, with a person who's insights and experiences make our world just a little bit smaller.

From here we head across the HUGE state of Texas.  We'll spend a thousand miles and about three weeks crossing the state and look forward to seeing the state change from west Texas desert, to the bayous that border Louisiana.

Mountains, Desert And Wind

Day 9, Mile 438

Leaving Seattle Airport

We woke up this morning warm and clean in Brian’s sister Kim’s apartment. We rode 91 miles yesterday to get to her house in Phoenix by nightfall (NOT a normal day with fully loaded touring bicycles!)  But we slightly miscalculated because at 7:30 pm, after riding an hour in darkness in the city with almost dead headlamps, we realized it was still at least 15 more miles to her house. Luckily a phone call later Kim was on her way to pick us up. We didn’t mean to cheat ourselves out of any riding, but there really isn’t any place to camp in the city (and we had been traversing the urban streets and sprawl for 50 miles). This morning, on our walk back from the grocery store, there was still frozen puddles on the sidewalks – this is Phoenix! Where’s the heat? The last few nights it has been in the 20’s and we have been riding in our jackets through the desert for most of the daylight hours.

From our start at the San Diego airport we rode through that lovely city into the mountains, down into the desert where we passed things we never knew existed. For instance: did you know that hundreds of people buy huge expensive dune buggies and the trucks and trailers to pull them and take them out the middle of the desert and ride them around all together in the Sand Dune Recreation Area in southern California? OR that there are entire towns made up of only RV campgrounds and one under-stocked store in the middle of the Arizona scrub desert with hundreds upon hundreds of parked RV-ers? OR that the largest flea market in the U.S. operates from January to April in the rock-hounding mecca of Quartzite Arizona (another temporary RV town)? We learned all of this while slowly pedaling our way through the beautiful, stark desert landscape under clear blue skies. We have had wind enough to chap our cheeks and noses, coming from every direction, but the day into Phoenix it was such a fabulous tail wind that our normal 8-10mph pace went up to a steady 22mph.

After a week of cheese and cracker lunches and camping dinners Brian got us a large Dominoes pizza to reward ourselves for our 91 mile day (for $5.99 how could we pass it up?). We have camped in the wild desert every night, once in a little scrubby town park, and now our cozy bed, out of the wind, at Kim’s is a real treat.

We’re happy, we’re moving at our own pace of about 50 miles a day, and we’re seeing the country just like we wanted to.  Hopefully we’ll continue to see things that we never new existed.