Day 42 - Horca to Cuba, NM

Horca is no more than 30 miles north of the New Mexico border, but last night's sleep felt like we were in Greenland. It must have been one of the coldest nights we had on the entire trip.  We woke up at six am still in the dark as the nearby mountains acted as black out curtains. We rolled out of our tents wearing just about all of our warmest clothes (mitts, winter hats, long johns, etc..).  The tents were soaked with dew so we both hung our flies over the nearby fence.  Within minutes, the flies were dried off - but not in the usual sense.  The water had all frozen and our flies were now rigid with ice.  Freezing temperatures in mid August...

You're probably asking yourselves why we were awake at six am when we are both natoriously terrible morning people.  Up until this point we struggled to get pedalling by 10...  But our flights were booked for Aug 18th out of El Paso so the two of us had to boogie to get there in time. Today marked the beginning of our own route.  We purchased a map of New Mexico and started planning alternate routes for some days allowing us to ride a little more pavement than the designed route.  This was done because we needed to kill 100 mile days and that is quite difficult on the sandy washboarded roads New Mexico is known for.

We made it into New Mexico by 10am or so where we once again biked through the middle of a county parade (this time in Chaco, NM).  Some people thought we were part of the parade and cheered loudly for us.  After making it through the parade (and being bombarded with candy) we continued our pedal to Cuba, NM. It ended up being exactly 100 miles into the city, with about 16 miles on dirt.  It was such a treat pedalling on pave after nearly 2500 miles on dirt.  The legs finally felt somewhat fresh. We crashed early knowing that we had a 120 mile day to follow.

Frozen fly

Pass climbing made fun by the crazy Brit, Saxon, and his Belgian counterpart, Thijs.  We ran into Saxon a number of time on the trip and all we've seen him put in his body is coffee and hand rolled cig'rets.  And you better have real milk for his coffee...

The last of Colorado

Ola

This is a picture of a typical riverbed in New Mexico.  We crossed a number of "rivers" that had zero water.