The stars at night, are big and bright

I've forgotten some of the details, so these posts will be a little shorter. We're back in the desert, so I'm finding less interesting stuff to take pictures of. Let's see what's knocking around the ol' tinker.

Day double 2:
We left Las Cruces after waking up slow. The night before we got two pizzas from a pizza place next to our hotel, one of the pizzas was missing the sausage so they made an entire extra one for free for us. It was hard to get up from that food coma. But, we said our prayers to Mormon Jesus and hit the road.

Jerome likes to finish his prayers with a high pitched "YEYEYEYE".

We had a little trouble navigating through Las Cruces, but after riding through their college campus, we finally made it out of the city.

I have no idea what the fuck I was trying to take a picture of here. Maybe a football field?

After getting out of town, we found ourselves surrounded by farms once again. It was shocking how many pecan groves there were out there.

Yes, mom, I'm riding down the middle of the road. Somehow I've survived long enough to see adulthood.

We stopped at a small restaurant for late breakfast and were surprised to find an extremely nice guy named Scott that we ran into two days earlier. We caught up for a little bit, then he went on his way. When we asked for our check, we were told that it had already been payed for. Scott took care of it without saying a word. Jerome almost shed a tear. We vowed to pay it forward, so if you're reading this, come find us and we'll buy you breakfast. Once we got back on the road, we were greeted by a refreshing view.

Fucking nothing.

Before we knew it, we were getting close to El Paso. I was going a little too fast, so Jerome had me swap out bikes.

Did you laugh at that? Yeah, me neither.

As we rolled into El Paso, we were reminded of the hills we would have to climb the next day.

Once you get past the nothing, there's some pretty hills out there.

We finished off the day in the nicest hotel we'd stayed in yet. Got a taste of how the other half lives, and it was kind of boring.

Day 23:
For some ungodly reason our route sent us through the middle of El Paso. We found ourselves floundering through traffic for the first hour of the day. I thought it was fun, Jerome almost had a stroke (kidding, mom, he's fine). Once we made it to the downtown area, things started calming down.

Well I've neva! Tall buildings

We skirted our way through the suburbs of El Paso and saw some more skeletons of the past.

Drive in theater lives matter!

Back into some farm land and I finally realized that we were in Texas.

"One nation, under God," with liberty and justice for some.

Things were getting pretty barren, but we inched closer to our destination, Fort Hancock (my 5 year old humor makes me giggle every time).

Someone needs to see a doctor about low T.

We got to the only motel in town and settled in for the night. When we turned the lights out, I started feeling bugs crawl all over me.

Day 24:
We woke up, opened the curtains and were greeted with a window infested with nats and other small insects.

We intruded on their home. For that, I am sorry.

Needless to say, I might have gotten four hours of sleep that night. We got the fuck out of that motel and hit the road. On the way out of town, I started realizing everything was a little shitty.

Welcome to the set of Dawn of the Dead.

We've been noticing this with a lot of these small towns. All of the jobs are slowly disappearing and all of the kids are migrating to the bigger cities. They sort of just slowly dry up and die. Hopefully the motels stay open for those poor bugs. But there are still people living the dream out there!

Had to restrain myself from jumping the electric fence to pet the goats.

After a few desolate miles, we rolled into one of those ghost towns named Esperanza.

My ex named her new road bike Sex Machine. I told her to google 'sex machine', she immediately changed it to Esperanza.

After that town, it was a long slog before anything interesting popped up. But looky here what I found!

Texas's state bird: the elusive diamondback rattler

After that treat, we glided into the town of the night; Sierra Blanca. Once again, plenty of extremely nice people in this town, but not much as far as businesses go. There were a couple more fossils of better days.

I'm getting the uck out of here.

We met four more cyclists doing the same route as us that night, all gentlemen and scholars. Once we found the motel du jour, we did a quick bug check and crawled in bed for the night.

Day 25:
We jumped out of bed for breakfast in town with the other cyclists. Once we sat down, we started noticing it getting a little dark out. Before we knew it, we were in the middle of a downpour.

No, this isn't Jerome's doing

We decided to hunker down and wait for it to blow over. After a couple hours of waiting, I decided to hit the road. It had pretty much dissipated by then, didn't really even get wet. Not a lot happened on the ride, it was only a 35 mile day. Probably the coolest thing was having a train fly by.

Every time I want to give them the honking motion, but then I remind myself of how fucking loud the horn is.

We sailed in to Van Horn to crash for the night. For dinner we grabbed some BBQ. For some reason, Jerome decided to chip his tooth on a rib bone. It was like a quarter of his tooth. God I can't even think about it without cringing. But he's not in any pain and we've got a dentist down the road. Tomorrow is a big day of Texas riding, so I'm turning out the lights and hitting the hay.