100 miles on the nose today, Fabens TX to VanHorn. Crossed into Central Time too. Bright sunshine all day, started in about 35 degrees, up to 70 in the afternoon. Had some decent tailwind after lunch too. All in all, not a bad ride at all, even though we did about 20 miles on I-10, except...
I shouldn't have even mentioned no tire trouble so far in yesterday's blog--we had two flats today, one each, both rears. Can't be too surprised about either--mine had a very stiff piece of steel wire find its way through the kevlar, and Kathy hit a sharp stone thrown out on the pavement by some construction--at about 35 mph...a bit scary for her. We hear tell Fort Davis, our planned stop for tomorrow night, has a bike shop. Hope they have some 700c tubes!! Oh well, now I know why I skipped doing my morning pushups this morning--I got plenty of upper body work pumping up those two tires as hard as I could with the frame pump!
After the awful traffic yesterday, today the roads were deserted--except for I-10, and it wasn't all that busy either. We spent the first half of the ride on totally empty Texas 'farm roads' generally within a mile or two of the Rio Grande--and Mexico on the other side. The land's low enough there that much of it's farmed. The ground's turned over, but no crops have sprouted yet. On the other hand, yesterday and today we saw many trees leafing out, and it's nice to see some green in what is otherwise a truly desert environment. Except for a few drops of rain one day last week, it's been totally dry the entire trip, and I don't think the sun's been behind a cloud more than about an hour total.
We added up our total mileage so far--1080 for 14 days of riding, an average of 77 miles a day, right where we want to be. And Kathy, heartless taskmaster that she is, has quite a few 90+ mile days planned out for us. There's not a lot of distractions in western Texas, so we might as well ride...
We've had a couple of people ask how we're holding up to this sort of effort every day. The answer is...pretty well. No unusual aches or pains, though at my age, I certainly have a few well-known creaky spots. I've generally made friends with them over the years--or at least we've come to an uneasy truce--and so far they've not launched any new offensives. What happens, at least for me, is that riding the bike all day has become my job. I start out fresh every morning, work for an hour or two, take a 'coffee break,' ride some more, eat lunch, ride some more, and then the day starts to drag and I really want to be done by three o'clock or so. It seems to work best to be in bed by nine, sleep as much as we can--usually nine hours, and hit the road shortly after it's light enough to ride. It's really nice to have 2/3 of the ride done by lunch time.
Today I ate four and a half pancakes, two McDonald's hashbrowns, an egg McMuffin--no meat, OJ, two cups of coffee, a fabulous bean &cheese burrito, a pop-tart, an entire basket of cornchips and a pint of chocolate milk. Also drank about 6 29 oz water bottles. Haven't had dinner yet...sure am ready though.
Just curious, are you drinking any "energy" drinks or mixes during the ride, and muching any energy bars? (Cliff Bars are my favorite). Or, are you just sticking to human food and drink like it sounds? Though I haven't done any touring since the late 70s early 80s, I still have a thought in the back of my head to get back into some tours if the economy and political climate ever get back to normal in this country.
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