We peddled 83 miles today, and it was hot all day. But we had a very nice tail wind almost all day and only had one hill about 10 miles long with about 1000 foot elevation gain to climb so it was a very nice day of bicycling. We started out the day with two flat tires before we left camp so we got started a little bit late. One of them was from the thin wire that is in tires and there are lots of shreds of truck tires all along the shoulder where we ride. The second was from a cactus thorn and there are lots of cactus everywhere. So far I haven’t had a flat. We will see how long that lasts. Once we got out of El Paso today was a very desolate ride. There times when we went 30 minutes without a car passing us. Most of the towns we went through we’re all abandoned and boarded up. The first 8 miles as we were going through El Paso there was major road construction with zero shoulder so we were riding with the cars and it was very tense. One of the cool things though is there were signs that we saw often that have a picture of a bicycle on it with the words, “Share the Road”. There were no campgrounds and the only RV park had no water or bathrooms so we are staying in a motel tonight. It feels so good to sleep in a regular bed after the 83 miles of riding today.

We entered into Texas today. We are camped tonight at El Paso in an RV Park with a swimming pool!!! That was the first place I went after we rode onto camp. I was so hot and the swim cooled me right off. We had a very nice ride today of 65 miles. It was mostly flat with one big hill and we had about a 10 mph tail wind for about 40 miles. When it got to blowing good at our backs it was almost like having a motor on the bike😀 After our two day rest I felt pretty good today. Most all of my aches and pains and sore spots had healed up, and I rode along enjoying the country in relative comfort. Lots of farming in the area we were in today. We have seen thousands of Pecan trees, and I saw my first cotton plant. I lost my my really nice bicycle jacket off the back of my bike where I had stuffed it under a bungee cord when I got hot. The young girl from Quebec who Is traveling with us left camp after us about an hour and saw it and picked it up for me. Yeh!! Richard had his cell phone drop off his bike and a fellow saw it and picked it up and called.  We are still in the process of recovering that. Tomorrow we are going to bike about 85 miles. Sure be nice if we had another tail wind!!

Well tomorrow we are off on another leg of biking. The plan is to go 6 days and then take one rest day off instead of two like this time and that will allow us to shorten up  a couple of days mile wise.  We will enter into Texas tomorrow and we will be in Texas for almost 2 weeks, it is a big State!. At the end of each day unless we find a warm shower host home we camp at an RV campground that also has tent sights. Some are quite reasonable in price and others are a bit more. Some are very nice and others not so nice. The key thing is the shower. When we have been sweating all day on a bicycle a shower feels so good. Some of them have very little hot water, some of them have about the same amount of water pressure as me spitting, some have just one shower for everybody in the camp and you have to wait forever to get in, and then there is the ones like here, super nice. There are 3 separate shower rooms that are big enough to bend over in with lots of hooks, a bench and lots of hot water and lots of pressure. The RV park that we are heading for tomorrow has a swimming pool, whooooeeeeee that will be nice. The two days of rest have been great. Everything seems to be feeling good. We are supposed to have a strong tail wind tomorrow and that will add a couple of mph to our average. Talk to you tomorrow.

We were riding down the road and saw a sign “Entering Salem”, and then this sign advertising “Salem Baptist Church”, had a good laugh over getting lost and ending back at home. Yesterday morning Richard took off like a rocket on his bike with all that pent up energy from not riding the day before because of his broken bike. It wasn’t long before he was clear out of sight and John and I figured he was at least a mile ahead of us. After several hours of riding we were stopped for a rest, and John said, “is that Richard?” I looked where he was pointed up this small side road and sure enough here he came. He had made a wrong turn and got off on some side road. As soon as I saw him I busted up laughing, because we were ahead of him and because of the perfect timing of him coming out at that point when we were there. He told me that he forgave me for laughing at his bad experience😉 The sign reminded me of my own church, ” Jefferson Baptist Church” and my desire to go to church someplace tomorrow. We have been looking up churches on line and checking out their web pages figuring where we are going to go. The Church is the “Body of Christ”, the “Bride of Christ”, and Jesus died for the Church and loves the church. If we really love Jesus we will love His Bride. There are healthy churches and unhealthy churches, there are “true” churches that follow God’s Word, and there are “false” churches that follow man’s opinion. If you love Jesus and haven’t yet, search and find a healthy, alive, true church and attend.

Emory Pass is what we went over 2 days ago, but I am just now figuring out how to upload pictures from my phone to my IPad and into this blog sight. So here you have the sign at the top. I was incredibly happy to see it. I was by myself so I couldn’t get a picture with me in it. My plan was to have me next to the sign flexing my muscles, or maybe with me and my tongue hanging out, or maybe with me laying on my back, or maybe with me laying on my back with a vulture sitting on me!

Here is a picture of my new “extra wide mountain bike” handle bars on my new bike. The road bike handle bars were  hard for me to balance the bike well, but these work great. Today we went 63 miles and it was almost totally flat. We averaged about 13 mph for the day. The only negative thing was we had a pretty strong head wind most of the day, but John rode in the front all day and Richard and I followed behind letting John break the wind. It doesn’t seem like it would make that much difference, but it really does. We rode along the Rio Grande river all day and was I disappointed. I could easily jump across it in most places. I suppose it is bigger after some rain, but today it hardly looked like the river I saw in a bunch of western movies. We are going to take the next two days off and rest up our sore muscles and various other body parts.

Today we left our camp right at 7 am and it was really, really cold. A couple of miles after we started Richards bike broke so we phoned the ladies to come take him and his bike to the bike store in Silver City that I bought my bike in to get it fixed. John and and I continued on today’s journey. It was all up hill for the first 20 miles, steep uphill, until we reached “Emory Pass” at 8,200 feet. I walked and pushed my bike much of the last 4 miles. The elevation got to me and I had a hard time breathing.  I would ride for a couple hundred yards and be huffing and puffing like an old steam locomotive, and then I would walk until I caught my breath and then ride another couple hundred yards. Once I got to the top it was mostly down hill for 33 miles to camp which is right on the shores of the Rio Grande river. I braked a lot coming down the hill because it was so steep and very, very curvy, but even with the braking I averaged 19 mph the last 33 miles into camp and I hardly had to pedal. When Richard’s bike was fixed the plan was to catch up to me and he would finish the ride from there, but they ran into a bridge that had 12 feet of clearance and the top of the camper is 13 feet, so they had to go the long way around to camp. They made it to camp shortly before I did, and about an hour after John pulled in. Poor Richard had to ride with the ladies all day, and they even saw and stopped at a quilt store on the way. Today was the hardest day of the trip for me, but tomorrow we have a 62 mile day and it is all flat as the road we will be on follows the Rio Grande River so it will even be a little down hill. Tomorrow night we will be at the “Siesta RV Park” in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

We had lots of hill climbing today with this spot being the highest. Tomorrow we are.going over a pass that is 8,200 feet high, and down hill from there and then we will be done with the big mountains and just have some “rollers” left. That will be so much easier!! My new bicycle is working good other than being a torture machine😀 We came by the bicycle shop that I bought it in for a tune up and I had them put really wide mountain bike handle bars on it in place of the dropped handle bars that are standard on road bikes. With the extra width I can balance the bike much easier. I will take a picture tomorrow of them. They are so wide my bike looks like a Texas long horn. Last night it was a shade above freezing and Patty and I both froze and didn’t sleep very well. We were all bundled pretty good as we started out this morning on our bikes. John and Mary Ann gave us the heater out of their little trailer to use in our tent tonight so we should be much warmer, though the forcast is 29 degrees here tonight.

 We road almost 75 miles today, with much of it uphill, and I rode my new Trek Touring Bicycle. I dismantled  the trike I built at 6:30 am this morning and it is now tied securily to the top of Richard and Mary’s Camper where it will stay until May. We are camped tonight at a KOA campground in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and I am sitting in the laundry room where it is warm  and has free WiFi. My shoulder, arm and neck muscles are extremely sore and tired tonight and my butt hurts terribly from my bicycle ride today on a “regular” bike, but I averaged close to 12 mph  and the traffic was never an issue. It was sad this morning taking the Duke Trike apart in that it was a fun experiment that I wished had worked. Oh well we can add it the long list of crazy ideas that I have had that haven’t worked. Last night we were at a “Warm Shower” host home and we set up our tent in their backyard. In the middle of the night a cat squeezed in the door of our tent and jumped on Patty, she screamed  waking me with a start. We both had a good laugh at the “demon” that had startled us, and then I caught the cat and threw him out of the door of our tent. Today we stopped for a rest, some water, and some snacks about 25 miles into the day.  My new bike doesn’t have a kick stand so we usually stop by a sign or road marker and I lean my bike against it. I had gotten some snacks out of the bag on the back of my bicycle, and a few minutes later a truck coming by caused my bike to fall over from their wind. I had my wallet in the top of the bag and when it fell my wallet fell out on the ground and none of us saw it happen. We road 10 miles and stopped for lunch and when I opened the bag on the back of my bike to get my wallet it was not there. I started racking my brain trying to remember where I had put it, and the three of us agreed that it might have fallen out when the bike fell. The ladies were almost to where we were having lunch, so when they got there, Mary Ann drove Patry and I back to where We had stopped. It was going to be such a hassle if I couldn’t find it, but when we got to the spot there it lay, thank You, Lord. Challenges are so much fun to face, solve, and conquer.  I can’t wait for what is in store for us tomorrow.

I got so frustrated today with my Recumbent Trike that I pulled over, called Patty and the ladies and asked if they would pick me up when they passed me, and drive me into Silver City, New Mexico so I could buy a bicycle. This morning the rumble strip was spaced so I couldn’t fit between it and the edge of the road, it was just wide enough that I couldn’t strattle it with the trike, so I road out in the road and watched for cars coming up behind me in my mirror and road on the rumble strip until the vehicle passed, and it would about shake me to death. 3 times my chain came off, once my saddle bag fell off, I couldn’t keep my mirror adjusted because of the shaking, and all my trail mix that I had in a container attached to my front rail to snack on as I rode flew out. So now I am the proud owner of a year old Trek Touring Bike. The guys in the bike store were super nice and got the bike all adjusted and fit to my leg and arm length. I gave my “Butt Butter” away to John, but I asked him tonight if I could have it back, and I think he is going to give it back to me. So tomorrow is a new adventure. We will see how it goes!