Through the Desert... to Lands of Green (2024)

Through New Mexico and Texas

Posted Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 7:50 pm PT|Updated Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:05 pm PT

Since Silver City, New Mexico (population 17), the maps said we’d be passing through cities with services. Yeah, all the grocery stores were shut down. We’ve seen a lot of that in the past week.

Since we hit New Mexico, we’ve been riding along the border and we went through El Paso. Let’s just say we didn’t want to stop and sight see.

Before we made it to Del Rio, we had winds hitting us at 25 mph head on. We were pissed at the ridiculous amount of time it was taking for us to ride. What would have taken us 2-3 hours was taking us 4-6 hours.

Our morale was definitely low. We were tired and getting on each others nerves... and the hills! It was hill after hill! And then when you add the 25 mph winds… it was the worst!! AND we were running out of water.

Communication was poor from whoever was riding the bikes and who was driving the RV. We had a hard time communicating where to meet up to switch. Did I mention there was absolutely nothing to look at?

So it was a definite sigh of relief when we made it to Del Rio, the most populated city since Tempe. When we saw Amistad Reservoir, there was no way we couldn’t stop, the water was so blue! And it was so big! We thought, we HAVE to go swimming here! It’s exactly what we needed after our draining past couple of days. The reservoir was cold – which was perfect for how hot it was outside. Coco loved it too!

We ended up staying at a hotel for the night, and checked out a local country bar, the Diamond Lils. We were meeting all sorts of people!

The next day, we were STILL riding through the desert. "This effin blows" was definitely our mantra for the day. As were going up a big hill, a family pulled over and handed us two bottles of water.

We got out of the car and talked about our tour and they video taped us, too. They were driving from New York to San Diego. The husband owns a protein barbusiness and he talked about sponsoring us. It was really amazing to meet such genuine people.

The following day we stayed at Fort Clark Springs in Bracketville, Texas. The only notable bit about our stay here is that we enjoyed a swim in a HUGE pool with natural water from the local springs.

The next day, we FINALLY got out of the desert. It was UH-MAAAAZ-ing! The maps were showing us that we’d be hitting green. And we certainly did. We were surrounded by greenery and country back roads. There were deer, foxes, and dead boars on the side of the road. At this point we were finally able to slow down and smell the roses, riding only about 5 hours a day.

Today, we stopped at the Guadalupe River. We rode nearly 40 miles and stopped at the river where there were waterfalls, camps and tons of friendly people waving at us.

We met a couple who’s traveling from St. Augustine to San Diego, so we exchanged information about our trips. We were able to tell them what to anticipate and they’ve already experienced our second half of our trip. We were SO grateful for the information!

It’s supposed to be all flat from here on out! It’s definitely a morale booster! It’s such a relief because we’ve been working so hard and we’re so sore. Our legs are getting stronger, but we’re fatigued. All of the conditioning we did before the trip is finally paying off. Everything about Texas is getting a whole lot better!

Oh, Rick and I tried to save a deer today. Its head was stuck in a fence. We thought, “How are we going to save this guy?” So we came up with a plan. As we started to approach it, we started to freak out. It heard us coming, and pulled its head out really quick and booked it another 50 feet. And ran its head back into thefence.

Oh, and there were some cows on one side of a fence when we were riding. One of the cows was staring at Rick, staring at me. Then the cow jumped over the 5-foot fence and booked after us! Let’s just say up until now, this week has not been a whole lot of fun!