Miles today: 153
Time in the saddle: 4 hrs 3 min
Started the day off with a bomb-diggity breakfast with Pat’s cousin Edie. She took us to Triumph and we loaded up our bikes (after Julie nitpicked the bill). After that, we left our airplane luggage with Edie and headed to the Sandia Crest.
We were literally ready to go when Julie realized that we still needed to adjust her shifter to accomodate her new boots. It was kind of a letdown. But it didn’t take very long and then we were on our way.
Well, this drought is really screwing things up for us. The Sandia Crest road was closed due to fire danger. BOOOO. Jaron got a sheet with some info about closures from the rangers and we went to Subway to eat lunch and regroup. After looking at that info, plus National Park info, plus National Forest info, plus state park and Bureau of Land Management info, Julie concluded that we are just going to have to be ok with the road being closed and having to turn around. The conflicting info sometimes specifies that the park is closed but the road may be open. So…yeah. We finally worked out a plan and headed south to the Gila national forest which does not seem to be as much on fire.
Our first destination this afternoon was the humble township of Mountainair. There were road closures, but due to a movie being filmed. All we wanted was a pit stop and there was a general store and a grocery store, and we couldn’t go to the general store because movie. We wondered if a lot of movies were filmed in this town, because storefronts said “Dilley, TX”.
From there we went thru several other small towns and mostly flat land. We could see several mountain ranges in the distance, and rode thru some cutaways in the red rock. There was a black mesa, too, which was pretty cool.
As we turned west towards Socorro, the road was literally straight as far as you could see, headed in to the sunset, with mountains in the backdrop. It was straight out of a western movie.
It was hot today. We drank ridiculous amounts of water and took a lot of breaks. Jaron discovered that ge could wet his neck thing and that felt better. In Socorro, we hit a wal-mart for sun screen and then hit the easy button at a Holiday Inn Express with a non-chain restaurant within walking distance. It was super good, Italian. We both got salads and pasta and split a tiramisu.
We are tie-rud and plan to go to the VLA tomorrow. We may camp tomorrow so I may not blog until the next day.
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