our first day back on the bike was flat, relatively windless, and BEAUTIFUL. the kind of beautiful so rare and exquisite that every couple minutes one of us felt the need to comment how lovely it was. the route wound through hills and mountains, so every turn had a surprising new view. we rode through miles of pecan farms then spent the rest of the morning along the rio grande. midday we passed through a border control station. jason thought it would be funny to pretend not to speak english, but we both balked when we saw the giant cameras and trucks and weapons. yikes. border stuff is very serious here, and huge amounts of drugs are trafficked through this area.
as we rolled along, i began to think that cycling wasn’t as tortuous as i remembered it being before austin. but still i felt my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. in the afternoon we passed through a few small towns, and we stopped in a place called to eat a green chile gordita and drink cold horchata. i looked at jason and he looked profoundly sad. “are you okay?” i asked my husband. he assured me he was fine.
we finished the day at caballo lake, camping in state park on eagle point. the lake had waves like the ocean and we ate dinner on the sandy shore. we slept under the stars without the tarp. new mexico has the best stars, clear and bright and winking. my sleeping pad started to leak and i found two huge cactus thorns in it. normally that kind of thing is par-for-the-course with camping, but since i was already unenthusiastic, i was more annoyed than usual.
the next morning we woke up and walked over to the rv park general store to have cappuccinos from a machine. we sat and sipped slowly, enjoying the promise of another beautiful day. as we were leaving, the man working the register asked where we had slept. we told him that we’d camped in the state park at eagle point, and he proceeded to point his finger and yell at us for “having the nerve to come into his store and spend money and but camp across the street… cyclists are the worst, so tight and DON’T YOU KNOW people have to make money but instead your throw your money at the government to camp in the park…” (it would have cost us more to sleep in his concrete parking lot than it did to sleep in our most beautiful campsite of the entire trip). i can’t really remember all the other rude accusations he made, but it was a few minutes of angry monologue. we tried to reason with him, telling him to put up a sign with a dollar minimum if he was concerned about not making money off bikers, but he kept yelling louder and louder and even my gentle and mild-mannered husband was frustrated. i still don’t understand why he didn’t take this up with us before we sat down and started drinking… i have never been the so terribly treated by store owner and i was LIVID, and so i did something rather regrettable and pulled out my middle finger for the second time during this trip. ah, internet, what’s gotten into me?
we got back on the bike, turned west and headed towards the mountains. i sat fuming on the back of the bike… smoke was probably coming out of my ears. i KNEW in my head it wasn’t a big deal (and that i had responded inappropriately) but i FELT so angry and defeated. as we kept pedalling, the headwinds picked up to 22-30mph. we were pushing ferociously but barely moving. my anger diffused into a general unhappiness that grew larger and larger until i asked jason to pull the bike over and sat down in the desert grasslands and cried.
“i’m so unhappy,” i told him. and then i started to laugh, because we were choosing to do this thing that was making us so miserable. but it was a sobbing kind of laugh/cry and i just wanted to go home.
i’ve had this feeling for the last two weeks, this feeling of wanting to go home. but we don’t have a home anymore, because our friends and our stuff are scattered all over the country and we are relocating again after the bike trip. so i wiped my tears and got back on the bike and we continued.
we began to ascend a few thousand feet over impossibly difficult terrain in increasingly awful winds. the bike would blow over and we’d re-right ourselves, only to have the same thing happen again. it was so scary being up on the cliffs with wind blowing us over the place- we kept having to walk the bike and even then we could barely stay upright. it took us 3 hours to go the 17miles to the nearest town of hillsboro, where we desperately needed food and water for the next 50 mile stretch (including our biggest ascent of the trip). every single store in town was closed, except for a tiny restaurant on the edge of town. we had no cash, and they didn’t take credit cards. at this point i began to panic, to seriously panic.
the restaurant offered us a free bowl of soup, and i did something i haven’t done in five years- i ate meat. i asked jason what animal it was, and he said it was a pig. i only a few chewy bites, but you can imagine my desperation at this point. i assumed that this morning had been the windstorm of the century, but none of the locals in the place seem affected. we told them about our ride in and they were neither impressed nor sympathetic. the walls of the cafe were actually shaking in the wind. “it’s windy season in new mexico, didn’t you know? mountains are impassable.” no, we didn’t know. after months of planning and researching, no one had told us new mexico had a windy season.
we discussed our options: wait in town for a week or two until the wind cleared- but the only motel was closed and once again, no cash and no food and no cell phone service. wait until someone came along with a truck who could give us a ride- highly unlikely, since we were in the middle of nowhere. go 60 miles over unknown terrain with a sidewind toward the next closest town, or backtrack two days to los cruces with a tailwind.
and so we turned around and covered the same 17miles that had taken us 3 hours in less than an hour. we got food at a different rv park (tamales and potato salad, no meat) and decided to bike as far as we could that day. every time a pickup truck passed we both stuck our thumbs out. eventually one stopped and gave us and our bike a ride 20 miles back to hatch, where we camped on the lawn of a high school. the next morning we biked the final 40 miles to los cruces.
as i write the story, it sounds so bleak and awful, but trips like this are emotional rollercoasters and when i wasn’t incredibly angry or incredibly sad, i was incredibly happy. biking is fun; it’s a beautiful, down-to-earth way to see the country. jason is the best travel buddy- he is patient, resourceful, funny, and attentive. both of us agree that the best part of the adventure is getting to be a team and be together so much. i am counting my blessings- it turned out that we got to do the most beautiful 90-mile section twice, and we got to return to my favorite place so far. we are staying with jason’s parent’s friend’s mom (thank you, facebook!) in a beautiful southwest style home- more about our hosts and our time here later.
we talked about selling the bike and doing some hitchhiking or busing around before heading home but we are both travel weary and ready to move on- jason to get back to work and me to have a home again. on tuesday we will fly out of el paso back to nashville, courtesy of frequent flyer miles from my in-laws. even in the end, we feel so loved and so supported!
i talked to friend on the phone who asked if i felt at all guilty about changing the plan, what with honeyfund sponsors and the blog and all these people cheering us on. the truth is, i do. but you are only newlywed once, and we want to do it right. there will be many more keil family travels and many more blogs to follow; being married might just be the coolest adventure yet.
